Washington, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and The Rockefeller Foundation announced a $50 million commitment by the Swedish government to the Global Resilience Partnership and the launch of the Global Resilience Challenge at the USAID Frontiers in Development forum. 

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) joins the Global Resilience Partnership, recently launched by USAID and The Rockefeller Foundation, with the shared goal of ensuring that communities and systems in Africa and Asia can withstand and thrive despite increasing shocks like droughts and floods and chronic stresses like extreme poverty and malnutrition.

The Global Resilience Challenge, is a core component of the Resilience Partnership, and represents a new model for solving today’s complex and interrelated resilience challenges by better aligning humanitarian and development planning, catalyzing new alliances, and fostering innovations and solutions.  The Challenge, a three-stage grant competition, will help develop and implement locally driven, high-impact solutions that build resilience in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and South & Southeast Asia.

“The Challenge will create opportunities for learning and communicating regional vulnerabilities, strengths, and interdependencies,” said USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah. “From climate change to chronic food insecurity and health shocks to economic and political instability, the Challenge provides a platform to foster collaboration among creative, innovative experts from diverse backgrounds in order to increase capacity and build resilience at scale.”

The Challenge is designed to bring together multidisciplinary analysis and expertise to address resilience challenges such as chronic malnutrition and health shocks, climate change, economic and political instabilities, and other vulnerabilities. The first stage calls for diverse, cross-sectoral teams to submit a brief proposal demonstrating their ability to think creatively about how to tackle barriers to resilience in focal regions.  In the second stage, chosen teams will receive up to $200,000 to further develop their problem statement and to develop a bold, innovative, scalable solution. In the third and final stage, teams who have built the most promising solutions will receive initial funding of up to $1 million to implement their transformative proposal.

“The Challenge will bring new ideas and new solutions to address the reality that extreme shocks and stresses are coming faster, hitting harder, and lasting longer,” said Dr. Judith Rodin, President of The Rockefeller Foundation. “We need to invest in solutions that build resilience and enable the most vulnerable people to escape from the cycle of crisis and create a better future.”

The additional resources from Sida brings the total commitment to the Resilience Partnership to $150 million.  Among other investments, these resources will be used to help develop new models for accessing, integrating, and using data to better understand tough problems; for increasing risk forecasting and management in communities in the focal regions of the Resilience Partnership; and for building local and regional capacity.