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Maggie Opondo, Ubah Abdi and Patricia Nangiro

This case study is one of four commissioned by BRACED to assess the links between resilience and gender in partners’ projects. It documents approaches used to promote gender equality in the BRACED Mercy Corps project, as well as the latent challenges and opportunities faced in this process

Key messages

• Life is changing for the Karamojong, with new challenges in the form of more tenuous livelihoods, worsening and recurrent drought owing to climate change and evolving gender roles. Social inequality exacerbates vulnerability, undermining attempts to build resilience.

• Reducing gender inequality and empowering women, men, boys and girls is critical to the success of the BRACED Mercy Corps project and its ability to ‘improve the well-being of households, by building the absorptive, adaptive and transformative resilience capacities needed to manage the shocks and stresses of climate extremes and disasters at the individual, household, community and systems scales’.

• There are a number of opportunities that the project can harness to increase its gender-related impact and drive resilience in the region, including a committed team with strong technical capabilities, a strong legal and policy framework on gender equality and Mercy Corps’ own experience from the field of gender and resilience in the Sahel and Somalia.

• Many challenges remain, including the project’s short timeframe, the number of actors working in the same space and the challenges inherent in trying to communicate and secure support for gender and resilience activities that partners and beneficiaries either do not understand or value.