ResilientAfrica Network

ResilientAfrica Network (RAN) is a non-profit platform that is a multi-country project with its headquarters at Makerere University School of Public Health. It was established in 2012 and brings together 20 universities across 13 countries in Africa as well as two US-based universities: George Washington University and Georgetown University. RAN's Theory of Change states: “The resilience of people and systems in Africa will be strengthened by leveraging knowledge, scholarship, and creativity to incubate, test, and scale innovations that target capabilities and reduce vulnerabilities identified by an evidence-based resilience framework.” RAN seeks to identify dimensions of vulnerability in select African communities and support local universities to incubate innovative approaches that build resilience.

RAN is one of the eight development labs housed inside the USAID Office of Science and Technology (OST)'s Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN). Prof. William Bazeyo, the Director of the HESN Development Lab for RAN at Makerere University in Uganda, oversees the work.

RAN thematically on three parts of the Stanford endeavor which is creation and implementation of Massively Scaled Online Courses, Deliberative Polling Training, and RIL Training.

RAN's Objective
The main goal of RAN is to support the creation and expansion of novel, sustainable solutions and strategies that can improve the ability of marginalized African communities to withstand, adjust to, or recover from shocks and strains, both natural and man-made, thus enhancing their resilience. The Eastern Africa Resilience Innovation Lab (RILab) of RAN is housed at Makerere University and has the mission of identifying creative ideas from the academic community that align with RAN's thematic focus and facilitating their incubation and piloting.

RAN's Innovative Approach
Innovation crowdsourcing: RAN identifies ideas that have the greatest potential to influence resilience through crowdsourcing. Through the Resilience Innovation Acceleration Program (RIAP), a selected group of innovators are selected to participate in events or exhibitions and get mentoring and/or assistance.

Putting community needs first RAN supports fresh concepts and inventions that cater to the particular requirements of regional communities through themed Open Resilience Innovation Challenges (RIC).

Collaborative Resilience Innovation create (CRID) is a process by which RAN brings specialists together and leads them in a co-creation process to create projects that tackle several system-level issues.