Initiative:

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Gender equality, youth & social inclusion

Other impact areas

Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA), East and Southern Africa (ESA), West and Central Africa (WCA)

Challenge

Hunger and severe malnutrition are surging in fragile and conflict-affected settings (FCASs), which often struggle to sustain resilient food, land, and water systems (FLWSs) in the face of the climate crisis. Some 1.5 billion people live in FCASs; they face significant livelihood challenges, compounded by climate change, unsustainable resource consumption, poor governance, weak social cohesion, and a lack of access to basic services. By 2030, an estimated two-thirds of the world’s extremely poor will live in FCASs. Conflict and forced migration often result from and further escalate the humanitarian and development challenges FCASs face. As of 2022, an alarming 103 million individuals globally were forcibly displaced, with 80% of them suffering from acute food insecurity and high levels of malnutrition. 83% of the world’s international refugees, many of whom have been displaced for years, even decades, are hosted by low and middle-income countries.

Objective

The CGIAR Research Initiative on Fragility, Conflict, and Migration aims to enhance the resilience of food, land, and water systems in fragile and conflict-affected settings, where migration-related challenges are prevalent. By taking a systems approach and working in partnership with local stakeholders, the Initiative seeks to generate evidence to inform effective policies and programs that promote social and gender equity, climate resilience, conflict mitigation, and peace building in these settings.

Activities

The Initiative team works closely with governments and other partners on local, national, and regional levels to generate evidence on effective policies and programming before, during, and after shocks and crises. The team includes experienced researchers from across CGIAR working on fragility, conflict, and migration. FCM suggests a comprehensive four-pronged approach aimed at addressing the challenges of compound crises in fragile and conflict-affected settings. The four work packages—Anticipate, Bridge, Stabilize, and Accelerate— are geared toward strengthening anticipatory action and governance, bridging emergency operations with longterm sustainability principles, generating evidence to guide effective policies and programming, and accelerating innovations that address humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) priorities alongside local innovators, including women.

Anticipatory action and governance (ANTICIPATE): Evidence-based decision-making and strong governance supports effective anticipatory action in “compound crisis” situations.
Conflict and emergency operations (BRIDGE): Studying emergency operations serving fragile and conflict‐affected settings, promoting institutions and partnerships supporting long‐term sustainability and resilience.
Stabilizing individual and community livelihoods (STABILIZE): Evaluating policies and programs that seek to stabilize livelihoods by promoting food and nutrition security, poverty reduction and resilience, social cohesion and government accountability, and gender equity and inclusion.
Stability and peace accelerator partnership and grant mechanism (ACCELERATE): Harnessing knowledge of local innovators and supporting this with CGIAR science to pursue an adaptive approach that responds to immediate crises and addresses longer‐term systemic causes of conflict, fragility, and forced migration.
A recently added Work Package 5 focuses on learning and partner decision support – with the World Food Program as a key strategic partner – through dedicated funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). This work cuts across all four other work streams.

Engagement

This Initiative will work in the following countries as a priority: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Iraq, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

Outcomes

Proposed 3-year outcomes include:

1. Government, humanitarian, and development partners in at least five FCASs adopt conflict-sensitive anticipatory action approaches to help prepare for and mitigate volatile scenarios featuring compound conflict–FLWS risks to reduce costs, inclusively promote climate adaptation, alleviate poverty, prevent conflict escalation, and build social cohesion.
2. Humanitarian or development stakeholders in at least five FCASs utilize the Initiative’s Migration Decision-Making Assessment Partnership tools and recommendations to inform and integrate conflict, fragility, and migration programming along the HDP nexus.
3. Governments, UN agencies, or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in at least five FCASs either implement new programming or strengthen gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) and conflict sensitivity dimensions of existing policies and programming to help improve livelihoods and food security, including for youth, while promoting gender equality in FCASs.
4. Twelve local innovators design and deploy (in partnership with CGIAR scientists as part of the Initiative’s grant mechanism) scalable interventions that promote FLWSs resilience, peace building, youth opportunities, and/or gender equality in FCASs and settings characterized by abnormally high migration.

Impact

Projected impacts and benefits include:

	GENDER EQUALITY, YOUTH & SOCIAL INCLUSION The Initiative has a particular focus on supporting and empowering women and youth, two groups who are disproportionately negatively affected by fragility and conflict. An estimated 4.3 million women and 1.7 million youth stand to benefit from innovations promoting equality and inclusion.
	NUTRITION, HEALTH & FOOD SECURITY Through the Initiative, an estimated 0.9 million children under five in addition to 3.1 million people overall — or 4 million total — will benefit from CGIAR innovations that improve nutrition, health, and food security.
	POVERTY REDUCTION, LIVELIHOODS & JOBS A total of 6.6 million people will benefit from CGIAR innovations through FCM promoting poverty reduction, livelihoods, and jobs.
	CLIMATE ADAPTATION & MITIGATION An estimated 4.6 million individuals living in countries with high vulnerability to both insecurity and conflict and the impacts of climate change will benefit from CGIAR climate-adapted innovations.
	ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH & BIODIVERSITY At a conservative estimate, more than 450,000 hectares of farm land in FCM countries could benefit from improved management.

Projected benefits are a way to illustrate reasonable orders of magnitude for impacts which could arise as a result of the impact pathways set out in the Initiative’s theories of change. In line with the 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy, Initiatives contribute to these impact pathways, along with other partners and stakeholders. CGIAR does not deliver impact alone. These projections therefore estimate plausible levels of impact to which CGIAR, with partners, contribute. They do not estimate CGIAR’s attributable share of the different impact pathways.

Partners

The CGIAR Initiative on Fragility, Conflict and Migration has a wide array of partners, including: demand partners (donors, development banks, multilateral organizations, government, UNFSS HDP Nexus Coalition, and humanitarian and development NGOs); innovation partners (local NGOs, the private sector, global and national research institutions, and research consortiums); scaling partners (multilateral organizations (IOM and WFP), INGOs (ICRC and World Vision), governments (USAID FEWSNET, and ministries of agriculture), private actors, and UN agencies (UNHCR and UN Systems cluster).