Resilience Design Course Resilience Design Mentorship Pilot: Approach, Findings, and Lessons Learned: September 2020

From May 2019-March 2020, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA)-funded Strengthening Capacity in Agriculture, Livelihoods and Environment (SCALE) Award piloted an agriculture mentorship project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with a small group of agriculture technical staff from Food Security Program (FSP)-Enyanya, a USAID/BHA-funded Development Food Security Activity (DFSA). This report summarizes the pilot methodology, findings from baseline and endline surveys, and lessons learned from the process.

FSP-Enyanya is implementing the Resilience Design in Smallholder Farming Systems (RD) approach on 18 hillsides in South Kivu (referred to by FSP-Enyana as “L’approche Colline” or the “Hill Approach”). By May 2019, the FSP-Enyanya team had completed two in-person RD trainings, one in July 2017 and one in November 2018. Given the technical complexity of the RD approach and its associated techniques, the trainings were an important foundation in transferring the technical knowledge and application to staff. However, the team acknowledged that further ongoing technical support was necessary for those staff who were responsible for training farmers on the approach. SCALE used this as an opportunity to pilot its remote mentorship/coaching approach in order to learn and adapt for future support to other BHA-funded activities