The Technical Consortium for Building Resilience in the Horn of Africa (TC) is a project of the CGIAR, which was formed in 2011 following the effects of the 2011-2012 drought. The main aim of the Technical Consortium initially was to provide financial and technical support to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and its member states (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda) to formulate regional and national investment programmes for the long-term development of ASALS and to follow this with technical support, with particular focus on monitoring and evaluation and the targeting of investments within these plans. These investment plans became the Country Programme Papers (CPPs) for drylands projects for the Member States and the Regional Programming Framework (now the IGAD Drought Disaster Resilience Sustainability Initiative (IDDRSI)), which focused on investment plans to address regional issues for IGAD. The focus of the TC’s work at present is to collaborate with different partners, specifically including the governments in the region as their plans develop, to provide tools for measuring the impact of investments on enhanced resilience and to develop decision support tools for better targeting and prioritization of investments or projects. These tools will not only be useful for monitoring the impact of interventions within the national drylands investment plans and provide evidence for rational decision-making and prioritization, but will be applicable for donors, developments, NGOs and civil society when measuring or targeting their projects.

It has been noted that there is a gap between the strategies that decision makers use to allocate policy-related investments for ASALs and the analytical techniques that researchers use to model the conditions of ASALs and assess the impact of related interventions. To help bridge this gap, the TC has been working to develop and apply approaches to support evidence-based decision-making and investment prioritization to enhance resilient development trajectories in Horn of Africa (HoA). The result will be a toolbox of methodologies and application processes that facilitate the capacities of the IGAD member states to identify the investments with greatest potential for the highest impact to build resilience to shocks and stressors, in particular to drought, in the HoA. The toolbox will be tailored to elucidate the implications of more focused interventions, for a more specific sub-population of interest, as those details are specified by IGAD or the member states. It will also be able to test how well investments perform under different conditions (climatic and otherwise) and over varied time horizons. The toolbox will be of use to multiple audiences, but the primary focus for application will be to provide tools for the Government of Kenya (GoK) National Drought Management Authority (NDMA), to assist with decision analysis and prioritization for investment proposed in the Kenya Ending Drought Emergencies Common Programme Framework (EDE CPF) drylands investment plan. It is also assumed, however, that the conceptual analysis and knowledge gained in the provision of tools to the GoK NDMA will also be of use to other clients such as NGOs, donors and development partners to assist with their decision making processes and that these tools will also have potential for replication in the remaining IGAD member states.