Stage 4
Learn
This stage helps communities learn from the results of their resilience‑building actions. It helps your National Society enable communities to:
- Acknowledge achievements and identify what makes them successful.
- Recognize failures and understand why they happened.
Adjust plans or make new ones based on this knowledge. - Involve all community members and other stakeholders in the learning process.
- Use the process to motivate existing stakeholders and others to provide additional support.
It also helps your National Society to:
- Identify results to report to donors.
- Analyse the quality of your services, including to what extent community members have found them useful.
- Reflect and provide feedback on the EVCA process.
- Develop an evidence base for mobilizing additional funds to support communities.
The guidance for this stage considers all the landmarks of our approach and the services we provide. See Table 7.
| Risk-informed | We base the process on an initial risk assessment carried out by the community. We encourage the community to consider new risks or information needs that emerge after the assessment. |
| Holistic | We use the dimensions of community resilience. We encourage the community to consider changes in and outside the community that may have contributed to successes or failures. |
| Demand‑driven | We enable the community to understand the purpose of monitoring and ensure resilience actions are driven solely by the community’s needs and priorities. |
| People‑centred and inclusive | We ensure that community members’ perspectives and monitoring (rather than external actors or data sources) drive and inform the process. We encourage and facilitate the participation of all sectors of the community, supporting social inclusion in the longer term. |
| Climate smart and environmentally sustainable | We ensure that community actions and learning take into account past, current and future risk, including the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, temperature rise and other longer‑term impacts of climate change.. |
| Accompanying | We introduce the idea and offer continuous encouragement. |
| Enabling | We build capacity, facilitate, and pass on experience. We include NS MEAL teams in key exchanges and learn from their efforts. |
| Connecting | We encourage stakeholders to participate. We disseminate the results outside the community. We build support. |
Milestone 7
Learn from resilience actions
You will reach this milestone when you have achieved all of the steps below.
Follow the steps below to monitor the current status of the risk‑informed community action plan and learn from the actions that have been implemented.
Step 1
Motivate to monitor
Review with the community the reasons for monitoring. Monitoring enables the community and RC to assess whether the time, energy and other resources invested in activities have resulted in heightened resilience and, if not, how activities can be adapted in future. By tracking their progress, communities can learn from good practices and mistakes, and adapt their plans accordingly.
Point out that we often compare the results of one activity with others, to see what, if anything, has changed.
Explain why all stakeholders should contribute to monitoring. Give the following reasons:
- They might notice a change that others do not.
- Their observations may agree with that of others, building confidence in the result.
- They are entitled to know the results of actions in which they have invested.
- Their cooperation and collaboration may be necessary to successfully adjust or complete the plans.
Agree how to involve all stakeholders in monitoring. As in Stage 2, you may need to hold separate meetings with those who do not wish to participate in a large community gatherings. To involve external stakeholders, options include interviewing them separately, inviting them to participate in a community meeting, or requesting that they provide documentation of activities (for example, government plans to fund a health post, or photos of a reinforced riverbank, etc.). However you choose to engage them, make sure the views they express are fed into the main monitoring and evaluation process. Also seek to identify locally based monitors for the environment or other sectors that can contribute to learning about monitoring.
Based on the risk‑informed community action plan, ask communities members at what point it makes sense to check whether each activity has made some progress. They are in the best position to suggest realistic time frames in which change may start being evident.
Step 2
Track actions
At this point, the community resilience team may be ready to evolve into a community resilience committee.
Encourage the community to ask the following questions at regular intervals:
- Have we done what we expected to do by this stage? If not, why not?
- How can obstacles to progress be removed?
- What needs to be done to get back on track?
Help them set up a monitoring plan. When a community chooses its monitoring method, draw on the guidance in the monitoring and evaluation chapter in the Project/Programme Planning Guidance Manual and support from MEAL officers in the National Society. The community should decide on the methodology to monitor the action plan.
If planned activities need to be changed significantly, encourage the community to take those decisions together, with maximum participation.
Step 3
Update the measure of risk and resilience
Assist the community to repeat the resilience assessment process (conducted in Stage 2 or using other tools such as the Community Resilience Measurement Dashboard or the spider diagram). Whenever possible, use the same indicators that the community selected for its last assessment.
Encourage the community to consider new hazards or threats that may have emerged. If they identify any, they will need to add new indicators to measure them, complementing the baseline.
Assist the community to record the results of the repeated measurement process. This is very important because changes over time can only be detected if accurate records are kept. The Community Resilience Measurement Dashboard is a useful tool to help keep track of repeated measurements. Repeat data can be a useful reference point for other stakeholders.
Step 4
Draw lessons
After calculating an updated score for each dimension, encourage the community and external stakeholders to answer the question: Why have the changes happened? Help community members to list the factors in a visible way.
Reach agreement on the most important lessons that can be learned and document them.
If the resilience score has fallen, encourage the community to check whether the process has produced valid results by answering the questions in the tip below.
Make a note of these factors to enable your National Society to assess the contribution of the National Society to the community’s achievements and failures. Discuss these factors in your National Society and use them to report to donors that fund your work with the community.
Describe and assess your National Society’s performance. How well did you accompany, enable and connect the community? Is there anything the community seems to credit or blame the work of the National Society for? Through this exercise, you can regularly improve your service and measure the contribution that Red Cross Red Crescent Societies make to community resilience.
If you worked with multiple communities simultaneously (for example, when using a landscape DRR approach), find a way to enable them to learn from each other. Arrange visits between two or more communities or encourage them to peer review each other.
Step 5
Apply lessons to relevant stages
Ask the community and other stakeholders how they think their risk‑informed community action plan should change, if at all. Change might involve continuing, scaling up, adapting, innovating or stopping certain activities (see Reference Sheet HH on adaptive management). Accompany them as they repeat the action planning process described in Stage 3 and help connect the community with other actors if necessary.
Encourage the community to share learning with other communities, either by exchanging directly or through the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.
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