BRCiS (Building Resilient Communities in Somalia), is a Humanitarian Consortium that takes a holistic approach to supporting Somali Communities in developing their capacity to resist and absorb minor shocks without undermining their ability to move out of poverty. Created in 2013, the Consortium has eight members and is led by The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). It manages a portfolio of contracts implemented in all Federal Member States of Somalia and funded by various donors, including FCDO, the World Bank, USAID, QFFD and more.
Asal, together with the Center for Humanitarian Change (CHC), served as a learning Partner for BRCiS to support adaptive learning in BRCiS consortium programming. Asal was contracted to provide project management support and work with CHC to develop an Adaptive Learning Strategy that sets an adaptive learning agenda to strengthen its culture and environment for learning and adaptation and continuous Improvement Environment. The objective was to ensure that through effective learning and adaptive management, BRCIS challenged their thinking and practices to best serve vulnerable people in Somalia.
The learning strategy developed acts as an overarching guide to how BRCiS will collaborate to transform their approaches. This transformation will allow BRCiS to support communities to strengthen their resilience by taking a systemic approach to learning and adapting to the context of Somalia. During its inception phase, BRCIS agreed that the cornerstones or values of its Adaptive Learning approach, detailed in its Adaptive Learning strategy, were to be collaborative, iterative, agile, locally led and transformative. The strategy describes the BRICS objectives to create a culture for adaptive learning, which involves activities, described in the learning agenda, to strengthen BRICS individuals, teams and organisations mind-sets, relationships and skills in learning and adapting whilst delivering crucial humanitarian and resilience projects in Somalia.
