CreativeDrought - Creative experiments for building resilience to future drought in Africa

Drought events cause severe water and food insecurities in many developing countries. In many of these countries resilience to drought is low for a myriad of reasons, including poverty, unequal political and social structures, limited access to information, and problems adapting traditional knowledge to changing situations. In the CreativeDrought project we aim to increase drought resilience by combining local indigenous knowledges with scientific methods. With a multi-disciplinary research team, we developed an interdisciplinary approach that: i) collects existing drought narratives (i.e. stories about past drought events) and other useful local knowledges, ii) develops hypothetical future drought scenarios with a hydrological model (verified with local communities), iii) organises creative experimentation workshops in which communities build future drought narratives based on the narratives and model scenarios, and finally, iv) embeds the outcomes of these workshops in local water management.

This new approach needs to be tested in a pilot project. The pilot study area we have selected is the Mzingwane area in southern Zimbabwe, a very poor rural area, with a dry and irregular climate, traditional dryland farming systems, and limited effective water management. The region is currently experiencing a severe drought, related to below normal rainfall in two consecutive rainy seasons, and leading to major impacts on local communities in terms of food and water.

We will conduct interviews and group sessions, based around narrative elicitation, with various groups within local communities in the Mzingwane area. In this way we will learn about the experience, perspective and cultural significance of drought events. We will build on this knowledge to develop hypothetical future scenarios with a hydrological model by extrapolating the narrated droughts to outside their historic range. The communities can then use their own experience and the modelling scenarios to experiment with stories about possible future drought events and possible effective ways of responding to them. Through this experimentation they can build up experience of dealing with droughts that are outside the range of previous drought events. This way of increasing resilience to drought is regarded as robust because it uses scientific methods, is culturally embedded and bottom-up. It also ensures that the perspectives of different members of the community are heard and incorporated. Finally, we work with local authorities to make sure the future drought narratives that the communities have developed will feed into official decision-making processes.

The team of the CreativeDrought project consists of experienced academics from different backgrounds. While some have collaborated before, the project also creates new links and allows team members to apply their work outside the UK. We actively build on recent and current projects of the team members. The team builds bridges between different disciplines (natural and social sciences, arts & humanities), between countries (UK, Zimbabwe), and between scientists and local stakeholders (community members, NGOs and authorities). To increase success of the project, we will link up with existing projects in the same area and have an international scientific steering committee.

The outcomes of this research are diverse, including meetings and workshops with local stakeholders, high-level scientific publications, a website to disseminate results and archive collected data, and a proposal that aims at applying our new interdisciplinary approach to other case study areas in Africa and around the world. With the CreativeDrought project we hope to lay the foundations for new ways of increasing the drought resilience of rural communities in developing countries, by combining strengths of local knowledge and cultural expressions with scientific methods.

A coproduction approach is at the heart of the project, which means that CreativeDrought has several direct beneficiaries. Routes to wider impact have also been identified. The range of beneficiaries is as follows.

1. Local rural community members and groups in southern Zimbabwe affected by droughts
Through the excellent links already established by our local partners, we will work directly with rural women and men in southern Zimbabwe, especially small-scale/subsistence farmers, who will be direct beneficiaries. In these communities, there is endemic poverty and food insecurity, primarily due to socio-political and structural reasons but also due to barriers to scientific knowledge and poor ability to withstand extreme climatic events such as droughts. We will work with them to combine indigenous and scientific knowledge and experiment with narratives of future drought. We will ensure that multiple community perspectives are heard and shared. Through this creative experimentation process with possible future droughts, their preparedness and resilience to droughts will improve. Improved resilience will lead to improved livelihoods and contribute to poverty reduction.

2. Local water management agencies in Zimbabwe, as well as regional agencies in southern Africa
The second group of beneficiaries are local water management agencies and policy makers in Zimbabwe and southern Africa. These work with local communities and implement policies on the ground. They are, however, faced with the complex problem of managing the variable water resources, in the face of contention between different demands, perceptions and social structures, including those of (groups within) poor rural communities. They also lack the capacity to deal with extreme climatic events. Through a series of dedicated science-policy meetings, we will work with local and regional management agencies to see if the future drought narratives developed with the communities can be embedded in IWRM in Zimbabwe. This will improve the context within which decisions are made and resources are managed. At the policy level, improved knowledge on cultural aspects of water resources and drought will improve IWRM policy to enable sustainable, equitable and conjunctive use of the resource.

3. Local NGOs and humanitarian response organisations
The third group of beneficiaries includes local NGOs and humanitarian response organisations, working with communities to increase their resilience to climate variability, as well as providing emergency response should droughts occur. The improved understanding of local communities' perceptions of drought and how these can be adapted to prepare for an uncertain future, within cultural framings, will help NGOs and humanitarian agencies interact with communities to help them increase resilience, as well as in taking a timely response to reduce impacts when events do occur. We will actively engage in capacity building of these organisations through targeted workshops.

4. Local, regional and international communities of stakeholders, researchers & students
The CreativeDrought project has various indirect beneficiaries. These include rural communities and agencies that we will not directly interact with, but who could similarly benefit from the research, both inside and outside the pilot study area. Through partnering with other projects and outreach, we will share the project outcomes and ensure local capacity building. Through our project website and digital archive, we will also reach out to other rural communities around the world that are vulnerable to drought. Communities worldwide might benefit from possible follow-up projects based on this pilot study. We will also work with local, regional and international universities and education institutes to ensure the research benefits IWRM education programmes, thus helping to build long term capacity.