Capacity Building and Interlocutor Development with Relief-Development Stakeholders in Mapping Trajectories of Dignity and Community Building in Refugee-Host Political Economies in Arid/Semi-Arid Landscapes of Turkana County, Northern Kenya

This is a seed grant for Interlocutor Development among relief-development sector stakeholders in Nairobi, Kisumu, and Lodwar/Kakuma in Turkana County, Kenya. Planned for November-December 2022, we define Interlocutor Development as fostering a long-term collaborative investment in capacity-building among local stakeholders as key partners in co-creating and co-designing the larger research program, ultimately to move the impact of our research from policy relevance towards policy change. This proposed activity in Interlocutor Development would be the first step towards developing a multi-year inter-disciplinary research and outreach program with measurable policy outcomes on refugee-host socio-economic and health trajectories in Arid/Semi-Arid and other marginalized regions facing exacerbated impacts of normative natural/anthropogenic disasters and global systemic shocks, viz., the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War. Based on the outcomes of this proposed work, we plan to assemble a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and practitioners, and write two major grants to the National Science Foundation and the Templeton Foundation, with the long-term goal of generating policy-impactful research and outreach rooted in Integral Human Development.