Co-Designing workshop – Urban Climate Resilience Masterclass for Somalia

The co-design workshop aims to facilitate a collaborative approach to contextualizing the urban climate resilience training, integrating nature-based solutions, disaster risk management, and policy frameworks.

Event description

The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), in collaboration with the World Bank, Somali government partners and GCA’s training partner RedR UK, will launch a multi-day Co-Design Workshop in Nairobi to support climate-resilient urban development in Somalia. The workshop marks a key milestone in co-developing the Urban Climate Resilience Masterclass (UCRMC), a flagship training program designed to strengthen institutional capacity for climate adaptation in Somali cities.

During the co-design workshop we will use a range of methods to facilitate and stimulate shared learning and to build consensus for the urban resilience training contextualization. We will start the workshop with a participatory session early on to set the tone for an interactive experience. This will create the ideal environment for optimal creativity, contributions and alignment of goals for the workshop and urban resilience trainings beyond.

Some examples of how we plan on doing this are through:

• Peer learning using the four wallsactivity for participants to start talking about challenges and importance of urban resilience in Somalia. During this introductory session, participants will walk to a wall depending on if they totally agree, agree, disagree, totally disagree with the statement: “Somalia’s cities are resilient to the effects of climate change”. They will have the opportunity to talk about the challenges they face in urban resilience and see how their peers are affected in their respective cities.
• Case studies & best practice to facilitate shared learning, through using local experts and government knowledge. While engaging with local experts and peers about options for developing urban climate resilience in Somalia, we plan on bringing about fresh ideas and stimulating collaboration and ways to contextualize the training for the Somalia context. For example, through collaboration with City University Mogadishu and their mangrove research faculty, the largest of its kind in Somalia.
• Brainstorming around challenges and solutions using scenarios and existing urban challenges. We aim to capture and collate a cross pollination of ideas, challenges and thoughts. These will be fed into the urban masterclass and ensure that the final training reflects the Somali government stakeholders’ situations, ensuring that training feels relevant and specific to their needs. An example of this will be by doing a reverse brainstorming activity; participants think about the steps needed to successfully increase urban resilience through this training programme.
• Individual reflection, we will have plenty of space during the workshop for participants to reflect, learn and share. Through exploring the modules of the masterclass at module stations, scenario planning for resilience settings and looking at the roadmap for urban resilience for their region/ state, to name a few.
• Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching method where participants are divided into expert groups or teams and are assigned a topic or a part of a lesson to master, and then become responsible for teaching to another group of participants, thus creating ‘home’ teams where each participant is an expert in one aspect of a topic, in this case, one of the course modules.

Co-design workshop participants:

• Somali Government Officials (Ministry of Environment, Urban Planning, Infrastructure; SURP-II project targeted municipalities and State/Regional administrations)
• World Bank Representatives (Urban Resilience & Infrastructure teams)
• GCA (subject experts, training material experts)
• Urban Resilience Experts (planners, engineers, NGOs tbc)