KORE - Knowledge sharing platform on Emergencies and Resilience

Good practices and resilience

Knowledge sharing and capitalization of good practices have a key role to play in building the resilience of agriculture-based livelihoods. Considerable experience is being gained across sectors and ad-hoc solutions addressing shocks and crises are being found in many different contexts. A fair amount of these experiences are already being documented. However, the resilience-related knowledge gained needs to be systematically analysed, documented and shared so that development organizations and actors understand what works well and why and thus replicate and upscale identified good and promising practices in order to inform policies adequately.

Latest Good Practices

Improving diets while promoting the diversification of livelihoods and nutrition education in a protracted crisis
02 September 2020
Over 75 percent of the population in rural and peri-urban areas in South Sudan rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. With the outbreak of conflict starting at the end of 2013, the country has seen large-scale displacement, loss of livelihoods [...]
Safeguarding agricultural and pastoralist livelihoods by transforming a longstanding threat into a sustainable resource for women and youth
21 August 2020
This good practice fact sheet provides an overview of a FAO project implemented in Berbera, Odweyne and Toghdeer districts of Somaliland between 2016-2018 entitled “Supporting communities in Somaliland to ‘make Prosopis make money’ through Cash-For-Work (CFW) and small business development”. This project, [...]
Developing the capacity of refugees and host communities to produce, process and consume nutritious food in Turkana County
20 August 2020
Agriculture is the main livelihood for the majority of Kenyans, contributing 26 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In rural areas, more than 70 percent of informal employment comes from agriculture. However, in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs), [...]
Combining cash payments, nutrition education and provision of agricultural and livestock inputs to increase food security and improve diets of drought-affected pastoralists and farmers
08 July 2020
In 2016 and 2017, a drought led to large-scale food insecurity across Somalia, affecting more than six million people, including over 900,000 children under the age of five likely to be acutely malnourished. Following the two-year drought, in 2018, heavy [...]
28 May 2020
Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) is a transboundary animal disease (TAD) notorious for its ability to severely affect, and indeed disrupt, regional and international trade in animals and animal products. In FMD-endemic countries, which are usually developing countries, the disease threatens food security [...]

“Good”, “best” and “promising” practices

When identifying and documenting an experience, it is important to understand the different states of a practice, regarding the level of evidence and its replicability potential. And to recognize that not all experiences can be qualified as good practices.

A good practice can be defined as follows:

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A good practice is not only a practice that is good, but one that has been proven to work well and produce good results. It has been tested and validated through its various replications and is therefore recommended as a model and deserves to be shared, so that a greater number of people can adopt it.

"Best" vs "good" practices:

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The term “best practice” is often used; however, some will prefer to use “good practice” as “best practice” may imply that no further improvements are possible to the practice. It is indeed debatable whether there is a single ‘best’ approach knowing that approaches are constantly evolving and being updated.

For a practice to be considered as a “good practice”, it needs to be supported by a series of evidence obtained through data gathering and several replications. In some cases, a practice has the potential to become a “good practice” but cannot be yet qualified as one because of a lack of evidence and/or replications. In this case, it can be considered a “promising practice”.

 

A promising practice can be defined as follows:

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A promising practice has demonstrated a high degree of success in its single setting, and the possibility of replication in the same setting is guaranteed. It has generated some quantitative data showing positive outcomes over a period of time. A promising practice has the potential to become a good practice, but it doesn’t have enough research or has yet to be replicated to support wider adoption or upscaling. As such, a promising practice incorporates a process of continuous learning and improvement.