Episodes
Thursday Sep 17, 2020
The Power of Risk: Contingency Plans, Relationships, and other lessons from COVID
Thursday Sep 17, 2020
Thursday Sep 17, 2020
Deyanira Nevarez Martinez from UC Irvine talks about the challenges of doing research in COVID-19, and the importance of contingency and risk management planning. How would you plan if you thought everything might go wrong? What are your alternatives for each step of your process? When COVID-19 turned everything upside down, Deyanira talks about strategies for moving research forward. Deya's research is in California, but she's got advice that can apply for everyone in the world.
Thursday Jun 18, 2020
CARE of 1000 Papers, Part 2: Improving the way we work with partners in crisis
Thursday Jun 18, 2020
Thursday Jun 18, 2020
Puji Pujiono of the Pujiono Center and Victoria Palmer from CARE Canada talk about their paper based on the Sulawesi response in Indonesia.This time, they talk about what organizations can do once a crisis has already started to have better success with partners, and help them achieve their goals rather than hurt them.
Monday Apr 20, 2020
Monday Apr 20, 2020
Jay Goulden talks about designing a data system to collect information on pandemic response in 78 countries--a first for CARE. He says act quickly, iterate fast, and think what your system might need to be in two weeks or a month as the situation evolves. He also talks about reducing burdens on over-taxed staff, streamlining systems, and connecting data collection to data use. Oh--and make it beautiful to look at.
Monday Apr 13, 2020
Monday Apr 13, 2020
Holly Radice talks about how people have limited bandwidth to adopt new things in crisis, and how cash transfers in Ebola failed at digital solutions because of unrealistic expectations. Her recommendations: do everything you can to adapt and expand existing systems to push out cash safely, examine your context very carefully and frequently to see what market approaches work, and start planning now for cash transfers during recovery in a few months. Be empathetic to participants and financial service providers, and respect that everyone is affected. Finally, stay in touch with partners and cash working groups to find solutions that will support everyone.
Thursday Mar 26, 2020
Push Aside the Panic: Thinking Bigger than Just a Health Response to COVID 19
Thursday Mar 26, 2020
Thursday Mar 26, 2020
Alfred Makavore, a key responder in CARE's Ebola response in Sierra Leone in 2014-2015, share's lessons about how to improve our COVID-19 response. "At first, we thought it was just a clinical problem, and we treated it like that." Alfred encourages teams to think beyond a clinical response, to understand what communities are facing, and to build trust. "We have to push aside the panic." Engaging governments, setting up local coordination, and trusting field teams to make decisions are some of his key recommendations.
Monday Mar 16, 2020
Monday Mar 16, 2020
Learn to act with imperfect information. Take calculated risks. Remember who is most at risk. Those are just some of the calls to action from Andres Gomez de la Torre, drawing on CARE's learning from Ebola response. Originally recorded in August of 2018, this podcast has critical lessons that CARE is using today in planning our COVID 19 response, and are an important call to action as we know some of the world's poorest countries are about to get hit with a crisis for which they are not prepared.
Wednesday Dec 04, 2019
9 Things You're Probably Doing Wrong: Lessons from Global Cash Programming
Wednesday Dec 04, 2019
Wednesday Dec 04, 2019
Holly Radice--CARE's Global Cash and Voucher Assistance Advisor--talks about the most common mistakes she sees when people implement cash programming. Some of her tips? Pay attention to GBV, focus on women and engage men, and most of all--don't be afraid of cash! There are lots of resources that can help you get it right.
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
Design For Everyone, Not for Experts
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
"You need to design for real people, not for experts." "Be ruthless with what you really need, and what's just nice to have" Isadora Quay from CARE's Gender and Emergencies work discusses CARE's Gender Marker, and all of the attempts it took to get to a tool that would actually work for the organization, not just the experts. It's about building tools that can turn everyone into a gender champion, and not tools that contain everything. The other secret? Design on a napkin!
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Mobility, Instability, and Crisis: Creating Savings Groups in Emergencies
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Thursday Sep 19, 2019
Camille Davis and Barack Kinanga talk about the challenges of creating savings groups (VSLAs) in emergency settings. Barack works in Yemen, where they have been able to create savings groups, but only by making a lot of adjustments to our traditional model. Not every context works for VSLAs, and it takes longer for people in crisis to build up savings than in development settings. We also have to think about what happens if the people have to move again, and what they need to build resilience.
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
Isadora Quay talks about the process of developing CARE's Rapid Gender Analysis, and how embracing imperfection is key to saving lives. When we want everything to be perfect, that often means we delay or prevent sharing any information at all, which can be catastrophic in humanitarian (and development) settings. Making tools useful for a broader range of people, and focusing on practical, tangible suggestions, and analyzing results in plain language for non-experts are some key lessons to take forward. "Act fast, there's a huge need for real information in real time." Isadora argues that failure is inevitable, so we need to learn not to prevent it, but to manage it and learn from them.
Wednesday Jan 02, 2019
What makes dreams impossible: How we can miss the mark on creating programs that last
Wednesday Jan 02, 2019
Wednesday Jan 02, 2019
Hiba Tibi from Palestine talks about her favorite quote: "Fear of failure is the only thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve." Even in crisis and fragile settings, we must programs that create space for women's empowerment and will be economically viable in the long term. We can't let the changing environment prevent us from focusing on equality that will last. Check out the recent paper on how to do that with Women's Economic Empowerment programs, and the thinking on how to approach the Humanitarian and Development nexus for long term change.