Inanna

Climate change fuels historic and emerging conflicts by amplifying intergroup tensions in regions grappling with scarce resources and food insecurity. This complex web of environmental degradation and societal strife results in an urgent need for targeted intervention. Research and action by Corioli Institute members reveal that the interplay of resource scarcity, legacies of violence, and historical marginalization severely undermines the resilience and adaptability of affected communities. Furthermore, women and youth bear a disproportionate burden of the negative effects of the intersection of these dynamics. 

Our Solution focuses on Iraq, among the world's top 25 most water-stressed countries, which has seen a tenfold increase in climate-induced displacement between 2021 and 2022. In Iraq, the intertwined crises of climate change, water scarcity, and food insecurity drive new forms of violence amplified by weak security institutions, armed factionalism, and widespread impoverishment. As environmental conditions deteriorate, escalating resource competition between communities, tribes, and even the state itself continues to destabilize the region. This precarious situation urgently demands comprehensive evidence-based action to inform adaptation strategies and mitigate the looming threat of climate-induced conflict and mounting food insecurity. 

Thi-Qar, one of Southern Iraq's most marginalized governorates, faces disproportionate levels of environmental degradation, climate-induced migration, economic instability, underinvestment in development, tribal conflicts, and widespread violence. Residents watch as vital resources that have served communities since ancient Mesopotamia rapidly wither in the absence of rainfall and the lack of sustainable water management practices. At the same time, non-state armed group recruitment – especially that targeting children and youth - is increasing in Southern Iraq more broadly, in large part attributable to the Shia majority’s disillusionment with the crisis in living standards, representation, and governance. 

Our local partners for this Challenge, who already operate in Thi-Qar, also confirm that various other unofficial armed groups are banking on growing discontent with national governance shortcomings to motivate joining their ranks. A lack of awareness of sustainable water management, access to simple technological solutions, and unresolved intergroup tensions hamstring efforts to meet even minimal human security conditions. Widespread unrest, evidenced by the October 2019 protests and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, only grows. The women and youth of Thi-Qar remain the hardest hit by the convergence of these dynamics. Important efforts are underway to shape national and international policies and programs to address the intersection of climate change and insecurity, including those on which Corioli President and Founder Dr. Erin K. McFee has served as a researcher and implementation consultant in the region in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia together with the International Organization for Migration | UN Migration. However, the urgency for community-level responses outpaces the rate of governance and accountability changes at the national level. Our solution responds to the call by governments and institutions working in this domain to include women and youth in disaster mitigation and preparedness from the outset, including in conducting risk assessments and developing early warning systems for climate change and violence.

Our Solution – Inanna – draws inspiration from the ancient Mesopotamian goddess associated with love, war, fertility, and political power. The oldest known goddess myth, the story of Inanna depicts a wise, fierce, and courageous woman whose power is rooted in her deep understanding of mortality and loss. Her journey to and return from the Underworld is not just a foundational myth penned by the Sumerians to explain the changing seasons; it is principally a story of vulnerability and resilience. Thus, Inanna constitutes an apt allegory for the role that women and youth can and do play in communities profoundly impacted by the intersection of ecological vulnerability and violence. 

Our Solution leverages an environmental peacebuilding approach that transforms resource conflicts as opportunities to increase the role of women and youth in inclusive resource management, food security (including reduced food loss), and sustainable development. We convene multi-sector actors and local implementation partners in a fully participatory process to achieve the following: 1) strengthen community awareness and capabilities related to sustainability, food security, and inclusive governance and conflict resolution practices, 2) create an inclusive environment where all community members can contribute to the preservation and cultivation of critical resources, and 3) connect residents to public sector officials and private sector partners to ensure the provision of basic needs and connection to formal production markets. The primary technology for facilitating engagement and multi-sector connection and collaboration is SMS text: specific disaster risk reduction (DRR) and early warning systems (EWS) protocols are designed and implemented through participatory engagement with communities and relevant stakeholders throughout the project's life. Although the EWS will include all actors, the initiative will be women- and youth-led. A one-size-fits-all approach will not succeed in these contexts, thus demanding fully participatory engagement and leadership from the outset.    

In several foundational ways, our process is our product. It is research-driven and highly contextualized, with each initiative beginning with a three-month inception phase comprising a desk review, original impact assessment design, and data collection that involves targeted community residents. We deploy our innovative “ethnographic walks” remote video methodology, facilitating data collection among hard-to-access populations. This results in empirically grounded approaches that draw from but are not determined by globally developed expertise on these dynamics. 

In Thi-Qar, the Corioli Institute Solution team includes partners from the Rezan Organization for Development in Iraq, a non-profit started in 2018 in response to the conflict and displacement catalyzed by ISIS activities. Its mission is to alleviate the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities. Our Solution will drive empirically based design adaptations to Rezan’s existing training methodologies in Thi-Qar to ensure relevant, timely, and actionable courses on sustainable small-scale farming, water management practices, climate change and environmental degradation, and inclusive resource management and conflict resolution.

Examples of similar projects can be found here and here. The President of Corioli Institute is currently engaged in a comparable large-scale project with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) | UN Migration in Gedaref, Sudan.

Climate-induced displacement rates in Thi-Qar are the highest in the country, and the governorate has suffered the triple threats of disproportionately high armed group recruitment and conflict, water scarcity and contamination, and severe livelihood shocks. Inanna will specifically serve non-educated social support-reliant, female-headed, and rural and urban households in the Chibaysh District within the governorate: one peri-urban (grappling with water scarcity and pollution issues) and two rural communities (facing significant agricultural losses and food insecurity due to water scarcity). Our Solution supports women and youth in these communities and involves representatives from all demographics and sectors, including male elders and majority and minority tribes, to ensure inclusiveness and buy-in from traditional power holders for sustainability. 

Thi-Qar has been particularly underserved at the national level due to systematic failures of water distribution, management of increasing pollution levels, including sewage dumping, and modernization of critical infrastructures. In addition, recent research in this governorate has highlighted several ways in which the populations are underserved. First, even among the already marginalized (on the national stage) Southern Iraq, experiences with weak and unequal service provision are notably high in Thi-Qar. Second, trapped populations - those who wish to relocate but cannot due to financial constraints or caregiving responsibilities - struggle to survive in their current conditions and cannot move to better ones.  Third, rising unemployment among the young stems from a stagnant private sector, a shrinking agricultural sector, and an overwhelmed public sector, resulting in lower pay and less stable jobs for these often highly educated individuals, particularly affecting young women who face higher unemployment rates despite achieving higher education levels. Fourth, these issues intertwine with widespread civilian firearm ownership, tribal conflicts escalating into political disputes, and a rise in non-state armed groups recruiting disillusioned youth. 

Our solution addresses their needs by implementing the Inception Phase to ensure data-driven approaches to training, early warning system design, disaster response planning, conflict resolution mechanism strengthening and improvement, and inclusive resource management practices. This phase is also critical for trust building between our team and the communities, which is still necessary even with the existing presence of Rezan at the local level. The Capacity-Building phase delivers tailored training modules that empower women, youth, and other stakeholders to effectively address climate change, manage water sustainably, and implement low-tech rainwater harvesting in their communities, which is crucial amid rapid groundwater depletion and salinization. Throughout, our team will engage in a participatory approach to strengthening and building more inclusive conflict resolution and resource management capabilities. These capabilities include an SMS text-based early warning system for climate- and conflict-induced hazards and violence, which, when deployed, will catalyze the execution of the abovementioned disaster response plan. 

In the aggregate, Inanna equips vulnerable groups like women and youth with skills in climate change awareness, sustainable water management, conflict resolution, and resource management to immediately address the intertwining issues of service inadequacy, unemployment, and risks of violence or recruitment to violence by enhancing local capabilities and creating inclusive, proactive systems for disaster and conflict response.

Dr. Erin McFee has worked on reintegration and climate security issues in violence-affected contexts for 14 years in 13 countries, four continents, and all implicated sectors. She has spent extensive periods living and conducting fieldwork in comparable contexts under low-intensity conflict and significant austerity. Dr. McFee has developed and refined a fully participatory methodology (described in the above sections) that bridges the gap between the depth of embodied knowledge gained from years of ethnographic fieldwork in a single community and the applied demands of short-term project timelines. Her novel rapid ethnographic methods foreground populations as the experts on their own needs and are specifically designed to identify proximal leaders to support their advancement in their own words and on their own terms. 

Shwan Saeed is a geologist and the founder and director of the Rezan Organization for Development. He currently leads climate security efforts in Thi-Qar, among other governorates Iraq. Mr. Saeed collaborates with Iraqi organizations and institutions across all sectors at the governorate and national levels, focusing on community engagement and raising awareness about recognizing and adapting to climate change effects. Furthermore, he has received formal training on gender mainstreaming, adapting global best practices to the Iraqi context over the last six years. His direct experience in Thi-Qar will support the integrity of the participatory process and deeply inform Inanna's cultural relevance, sensitivity, and feasibility.

Heleen Berends, strategic advisor to the Rezan Organization, draws from a wealth of expertise on community-based development in conflict-affected Iraq. Ms. Berends has received formal training in public policy and natural resource management, which supports Inanna’s development and delivery of program and policy-relevant outcomes from this work to support sustainability and scaling over the long term. Furthermore, she brings knowledge from project implementation on Preventing Violent Extremism, nuancing the group’s expertise in operating in conflict-affected and insecure contexts.

Dr. Lyla Kohistany contributes her experiential knowledge as a social impact entrepreneur, cultural intelligence advisor, and inclusion strategist. As an Afghan refugee, Muslim woman, U.S Navy veteran, and NATO School educator with multiple senior-level deployments in South Asia, she has over two decades of experience working across cultures alongside local tribal/ethnic/religious leaders and multi-sector partners to understand and address root causes of instability.  As a certified human-centered design practitioner through LUMA Institute,  Lyla facilitates community-centered co-design sessions that prioritize sustainable and equitable outcomes by leveraging the lived experiences of those most impacted by conflict. 

Rimjhim Agrawal is a researcher at the Corioli Institute and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago. She brings notable expertise on climate and disaster risk and vulnerability projects for UNDP, the World Bank, and national and regional Disaster Management Authorities in India, Gambia, and Yemen. As such, her contributions to early warning systems and disaster risk reduction architectures for Inanna are critical. In terms of regional expertise, she has directly worked in economic development, climate policy, and government transparency and accountability in Iraqi Kurdistan as a Global Policy Fellow in the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Corioli Institute has completed four iterations of this project independently: two in Mexico and two in Colombia. Three of these had community-led early warning system elements, and one did not. The Corioli Institute team lead is currently working on a large-scale version of the proposed Solution in Gedaref, Sudan as a consultant for the International Organization for Migration | UN Migration Agency. The profiles of the completed projects are the following:

• Peacebuilding through community gardening (Las Aguas, Colombia): Beneficiaries included 45 rural families comprising former members of non-state armed groups, military veterans, civilian farming families, and victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. Seven families with representatives from each of those categories of individuals led the governance of a hydroponics community garden initiative that resulted from a multi-sector effort led by the Corioli Institute. It comprised state-sponsored vocational training on sustainable agricultural methods, materials provided by the local Chamber of Commerce, academic engagement, and local private sector involvement through the regional food market chain, El Primo.  Community members activated the early warning system during a heatwave that threatened to destroy their crops and were able to renegotiate sales to El Primo as a result, saving the initiative and ensuring its economic viability over the long term.
• Violence reduction through environmental restoration (La Gloria, Colombia): The women of the community of La Gloria – a government-sponsored resettlement site for conflict-affected populations – participated in a series of ethnographic walks that revealed a set of empty lots as a key area of environmental concern for the community. Wastewater accumulated in the lots and streets,  residents from La Gloria and other neighborhoods dumped their trash on the land, and packs of dogs would spend time there. The result was a serious health hazard for the children of the community, who often ran without shoes in the lot and and suffered from related illnesses and animal attacks. The odors affected all residents. The Corioli Institute and other multi-sector representatives supported the professionalization of a community-level women’s association, training in environmental sustainability practices, and the recent conversion of the empty lots into a community garden. This generated positive public health and environmental awareness among La Gloria’s roughly 3,000 residents and strengthened women’s community governance and resource management capabilities. A WhatsApp-based early warning system and response plan for violence and environmental contamination were designed and implemented, though the community has not yet had to activate it.
• Building intergenerational social cohesion and supporting sustainable practices in a fishing community (El Manglito, México): Community elders expressed concern over the impact of a recent incursion of cartels into their fishing community on youth interest in sustaining the community's economic lifeblood (i.e., increased youth flight). We engaged thirteen youth leaders in a leadership and oral history exercise co-designed with the community. This resulted in a coffee table book using photographs and interview data collected by these youth. Participants reported a stronger sense of intergenerational social cohesion, a greater understanding of and appreciation for sustainable fishing practices, and a stronger sense of identification with their community’s history. Copies of the book have been distributed to community members and are also available in their local library.
• Reducing gender-based violence and economic security through ecological restoration (La Reforma, México): One hundred and forty residents from a Mexican "cartel ghost town"—a community previously utilized by cartels for narcotics smuggling and subsequently abandoned, leaving it economically devastated—participated in a workshop. This workshop was organized by the local non-profit SUCEDE and received support from the Corioli Institute, which included assistance during the inception phase, organizational support, early warning system and response planning, and impact assessment. The workshop leveraged methodologies for forgiveness and reconciliation to reduce gender-based violence in the community.  Originally designed for the community's women, it was so successful that the men requested their own workshop, and gender-based violence in the community went down. Following community feedback and consultation, an ecological restoration initiative was developed to educate on the dangers of environmental degradation and unsustainable fishing practices and to contribute to sustainable livelihoods for community members. A WhatsApp-based early warning system and response plan for violence and environmental contamination were designed and implemented, though the community has not yet had to activate it. 

Environmental peacebuilding is a relatively new field, only gaining traction over the past 20 years. However, its potential for transformative impact on conflict-affected societies - including among those previously involved in producing that insecurity - is increasingly recognized. And the role of technology in the field, though identified, remains underdeveloped. Innovating technologies for addressing the issue of climate change are burgeoning, but remain largely siloed from the field of environmental peacebuilding, despite the increasing role that climate change and the weaponization of resource access plays in catalyzing and exacerbating war and other forms of violence.

The Inanna team is applying to SOLVE for support in identifying new technologies that can enhance the effectiveness, broaden access to timely, relevant data for the world's most climate-threatened communities, and facilitate the scalability of our environmental peacebuilding work nationally and internationally. First, our solution leverages SMS technology for early warning systems and crisis response planning. We are interested in identifying collaborative opportunities with tech companies that can provide expertise and support in enhancing the technological aspects of this element. For example, improving the functionality and reach of SMS-based systems or integrating more sophisticated tools (e.g., satellite imaging, remote GIS data, soil analysis). 

Second, the innovative ethnographic walks methodology has already proved invaluable for analytic insights and project adjustments to ensure relevance and support intended outcomes (while mitigating the risk of unintended ones). However, the team relentlessly pursues the elimination of resource provision-needs fulfillment misalignment. With the goal of “zero waste” funding – i.e., 100% alignment between beneficiary need and service provision - we hope to identify additional technologically-mediated approaches to ensuring project activities are tightly mapped onto community needs. Additionally, we would be interested in thinking through how technology might facilitate the design of universal metrics along these linesthat support commensurability from one project to the next while still allowing for each context's nuances. 

Third, while the Corioli Institute implements robust ethics training and standard data management practices common to most United States academic institutions, there is room to improve data privacy and data security. This is particularly important given the dual goals of reaching those populations most marginalized in war-torn regions of the world and making data available for other researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to maximize its utility for solving the world’s most intractable problems. We want to honor the contributions of our participants and ensure that their engagement with our activities, at a minimum, does not create additional security risks for them. Ideally, they will instead result in rapid and sustainable improvements to their everyday lives under some of the most austere conditions. 

In terms of funding, we hope that Inanna might serve as a stepping stone into larger-scale efforts in the Arab States In Asia (ARASIA) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions. It would be incredibly valuable to receive support to build additional relationships to help identify potential barriers and expand strategies in these contexts.

Inanna innovates through the use of technology in two primary ways. First, the use of the "ethnographic walks" methodology, developed and refined by Dr. McFee over her research on conflict and migration in Colombia, Sudan, Libya, and Kenya (in progress), enhances the accessibility of challenging and sensitive sites, often restricted by security concerns. It integrates technology and the authentic perspective of local participants, who facilitate access to their communities through snowball sampling. Participants, who represent their broader community, respond to prompts provided by the Inanna team by recording and sending brief videos depicting their daily lives, surroundings, interactions, and cultural dynamics through Telegram (analyzed using MAXQDA software). These videos provide an immersive glimpse into the respondents' world, aiming to "bring the viewer there" by showcasing life's everyday realities. Dr. McFee has found that the efficient and cost-effective approach consistently results in significant revisions to project framing, language, and assessment criteria, signaling its utility along multiple axes. 

Second, Inanna leverages widely available SMS texting capacities to support early warning systems and disaster and conflict response planning. Thanks to its broad reach and dependability, SMS text technology is an effective tool for creating early warning systems crucial for disaster and conflict responses - even in remote areas with limited internet connectivity. It is also swift and cost-effective. SMS systems can be scaled to cover large populations and integrated with various data sources like seismic networks or weather stations to trigger timely warnings. For this reason, our approach includes institutional stakeholders in its design. Two-way SMS communication can facilitate real-time feedback from affected individuals, supporting coordination capabilities. 

Recent research has demonstrated that sufficient decentralization of early warning networks can support spoiler-proof utility, a critical factor for historically marginalized populations operating in conditions of acute insecurity. However, contextualized nuance such as that generated through Inanna's Inception Phase is critical for success: geography, population demands, opportunities for redundancy and alternative solutions when necessary, and processes that remain agile and adaptable under rapidly changing, often deteriorating conditions are necessary for addressing immediate threats and broader structural issues. Equally important, SMS texting does not require the introduction of new conspicuous assets among the women and youth participating in the study, which can create unintended security risks. 

Inanna also methodologically innovates through its participatory approach to capacity-building and resource management under conditions of acute insecurity. Examples are legion of millions of dollars of international intervention support spent on misaligned or irrelevant projects. The Corioli Institute strives to erase resource-needs misalignment by engaging beneficiary communities from day one in the design, delivery, and impact evaluation processes. By combining ethnographic walks with other participatory approaches, the Inanna team has the community-level input required to ensure that the right responses reach the right people in the right way. We are not the first to use fully participatory approaches, but these approaches remain small-scale and isolated. Part of our mission is to scale these methods. Our work is guided by the principle of “Nothing about us without us.” 

Inanna follows a structured path from inception to long-term outcomes, which addresses the interlinked issues of climate-induced conflicts, resource scarcity, and social disparities in Thi-Qar. It acknowledges the deeply contextualized nature of communities’ relationships to and management of natural resources. The theory of change is the following: By implementing participatory methodologies and leveraging local capacities, particularly among women and youth, Inanna will create sustainable, inclusive governance structures and enhance local resilience to climate shocks and other threats to human security. This Solution transforms the complex challenge of climate-induced conflict and resource scarcity into an opportunity for sustainable development and peace. 

Activities in the Inception Phase comprise inclusive, participatory research and action methodologies, including ethnographic walks, direct stakeholder engagement, community vulnerability mapping, and focus group discussions. These actions result in analytic reports that guide site selection, tailoring Capacity Building Phase content, and early warning system and risk response design considerations. They engage intended beneficiaries in defining impact assessment and evaluation metrics to encourage adoption and sustainable assessment practices. These approaches increase the likelihood of relevant, comprehensive, and domain-inclusive responses. Immediate outcomes of these actions include trust building with the community, which is necessary for the Capacity Building Phase, enhanced awareness of climate-related and other threats to human security, and increased representation of and substantive ownership by women and youth in the narratives of communities' challenges. 

Activities in the Capacity Building Phase include training on sustainable water management practices, climate change and resilience strategies, SMS early warning systems, and response planning. Additional training content on inclusive resource governance practices and conflict resolution will also be delivered and adjusted based on findings from the Inception Phase. These latter components are intended to support knowledge acquisition and increase social cohesion and the transformational capacities of women and youth. Engagement with relevant organizations and traditional leaders will help align institutional capabilities and data with co-created early warning and response protocols for conflict and climate crises. Integrating local, organizational, and institutional actors fosters systems-level thinking that enhances decision-making in response to climate change. Furthermore, including those in existing positions of power facilitates the inclusion of authorities necessary for supporting sustainability and mitigates the risk of restrictive gender norms and practices undermining intended outcomes. Outcomes include a deeper understanding of environmental and climate issues, enhanced sustainable resource management, and improved conflict resolution skills. Participation and leadership of women and youth in resource governance, disaster preparedness, and response will expand.

In the medium to long term, Thi-Qar's communities will adopt sustainable land and water management practices, enhancing agricultural productivity and food security and reducing their vulnerability to climate change. An inclusive environment will enable all community members to contribute to resource management, bolstering social cohesion through improved conflict resolution mechanisms. This will decrease violence and vulnerability of youth to recruitment by violent groups, thereby enhancing community resilience and cooperative responses to future challenges. Thi-Qar will serve as the model for the region to support replication and scaling, amplifying the positive impacts. 

Our Solution includes various classes of impact goals, adjusted for the participatory approach to engagement and classified into the following broad categories:

1. Universal:
   • Representative participation of community members in all activities according to gender, stage in life cycle, disability, tribal affiliation, and livelihood. Indicators: Number of each population group attending project actions, reconciled with population demographic statistics.
   • Multi-sector inclusion in stakeholder engagement (public, private, academic, civil society, international development, public security forces). Indicators: Equal participation of all sectors in stakeholder engagement activities.
   • Inception Phase baseline assessments of the following: conflict resolution mechanisms, water and resource management practices, women and youth involvement in these mechanisms and practices, axes of socioeconomic and political in/exclusion, and access to and use of SMS technology. Indicators: Baseline assessments include Likert-scale assessments of the effectiveness of existing practices with a targeted 35% improvement from Inception to project conclusion.
2. Participatory:
   • Locally defined criteria for the following, articulated as SMART criteria (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based): inclusive resource management, resilience to climate and conflict crises, levels of interpersonal trust, levels of trust in institutions, social cohesion, and perceived responsiveness of local authorities. Indicators: Baseline assessment conducted at the start of the Capacity-Building Phase (given the role of the Inception Phase in determining the qualitative content of these indicators). Endline assessment conducted at project end with targeted improvement of 25% by project end and 40% by project end + 1 year.
   • Early warning system criteria and process. Indicators: Presence of SMS EWS criteria and process (Y/N); inclusiveness and women- and youth-led ownership of this process (Likert-scale assessment).
   • Crisis response planning. Indicators: Same as 2.B.
3. Learning Goals
   • Presence of systems-level thinking. Indicators: Likert-scale assessment, baseline/endline with targeted improvement of 50%.
   • Module-specific workshop learning goals related to climate change, sustainable resource management, low-tech rainwater harvesting techniques, and conflict resolution practices. Indicators: Multiple choice baseline/endline content exam with targeted 80% improvement.
4. Overall Intervention Effectiveness
   • 360-degree feedback assessment of the Inanna team and participatory approaches. Indicators: Strengths, weaknesses, lessons learned, and recommendations from the perspective of all stakeholders and community members.

Our team's broad experience highlights a major flaw in similar initiatives: a lack of long-term evaluation and follow-up, a critical oversight given the protracted nature of the environmental and social changes target. To address this, a portion of the project budget is allocated for a one-year impact evaluation to commence after project completion. This evaluation will assess the following:

• Degree of ongoing sustainable resource management practice application.
• Sustained increase in the presence of women and youth in community governance and leadership roles across all domains of community life.
• Application of early warning system and crisis response plans in the event of a crisis.
• Increase in advocacy capabilities vis-à-vis government officials and organizational actors.
• Increase in responsiveness of local authorities to communities’ needs.
• Degree of access to sustainable livelihood options at the household level.
• Repeated assessments of all items in 1.C, 2.A, and 4

Our use of technology is two-fold. First, we leverage audiovisual technology for the ethnographic walks methodology, sent through the Telegram app to the Inanna team to shape our project design according to the needs as our targeted communities articulate and define them. We use Telegram to accommodate populations who do not have the means to purchase large data packages for their phones and to ensure a greater degree of security for all involved. In addition to ensuring adequate technical support for their climate and conflict-related challenges, this method also enables us to better connect with communities by meeting them where they are in terms of how they talk and think about these issues. This technology choice is an intentional epistemological stance of Inanna: local knowledge bears equal weight and value as external “technical” knowledge. A phenomenon does not need to be named in a particular way for its effects to be felt in everyday life. The questions that any outsider might ask could entirely miss critical climate-related dynamics and sources of intergroup tensions if they do not leave space for emic narratives (i.e., qualitative and exploratory rather than quantitative and normative). Second, the participatory approaches to co-creating early warning systems and disaster response processes use SMS technology, which has the widest reach among the targeted population and ensures 1) timely activation of community responses and 2) the ability to engage in two-way communications to facilitate coordination of those responses. Furthermore, communities are already equipped with mobile devices and knowledge of this technology, eliminating the barrier to adoption and increasing the likelihood of effective, sustainable use.

Five people work on the Inanna team.

Team lead: Dr. Erin K. McFee (full-time staff, Corioli Institute)

County leads: Shwan Saeed and Heleen Berends (full-time staff, Rezan Organization for Development)

Design and evaluation leads: Dr. Lyla Kohistany and Rimjhim Agrawal (contractors, Corioli Institute)

The team lead, Dr. Erin K. McFee has formally worked on this solution since 2021 upon receiving the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Grant for her "Trust After Betrayal" project. The Corioli Institute, founded in May 2023, represents the organizational formalization of the work of Trust After Betrayal and will continue to grow this work at the end of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellow grant in December 2024. It is this continuity that has allowed the Corioli Institute to establish such a large presence despite it's youth as a formal 501c3. Shwan Saeed and Heleen Berends have led the Rezan Organization since 2018, and Dr. Lyla Kohistany and Rimjhim Agrawal have each been working with the Corioli Institute since its inception.

The Corioli Institute is a woman-owned, majority-minority, and veteran-led non-profit organization. In addition to ensuring diversity across the axes of ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, it works to decolonize its initiatives by building teams that are equally composed of U.S. or Western-based members and individuals from the countries we operate in. Furthermore, we actively seek veteran candidates for project work and identify opportunities for hiring, training, and promoting individuals from the communities we serve. The Corioli Institute has developed a certificate training course in qualitative data collection that has now been delivered by Dr. McFee through the International Organization for Migration | UN Migration in Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Kenya, and Yemen. This supports not only the integrity and consistency of data collection, but also provides a valued resume item for the participants in the course that enables them to access better job opportunities in often highly competitive and limited job markets in their home countries. Two out of five of our organizational values - Principled Leadership and Participatory Engagement - speak to this commitment to diversity, both within the organization and throughout implementation.

The Corioli Institute has four lines of action:

• Advanced research and action: Decolonizing research and action funding by partnering the global north with global south researchers to identify incipient, contextualized efforts co-developed with conflict-affected populations and bring them to scale through evidence-based outcomes.
• International development: Partnering with donors to integrate empirical data on the lived experiences of implementation (street level bureaucrats, mediating country missions, and community-led initiatives) into improved measurement and evaluation strategies. Working to more completely align provision with need – reducing waste, redundancy, and irrelevance in high stakes scenarios. 
• Climate and human security: Deepening and disseminating expertise on the Climate Change, Conflict, and Migration (CCM) Nexus to prioritize those initiatives that use environmental sustainability as a mechanism for the construction of social cohesion and resolution of conflicts, including through engaging those previously involved in those conflicts.
• Violence, Security, and Peace (VSP) Network: Maintaining a position as a leadership member of the global Violence, Security, and Peace Network (more info here). The VSPN’s focus is on the design elements of cross-sector collaborations among global north and south partners.

The institute is private donor, contract-based, and grant funded and plans on engaging with international development agencies after three years. The three-year milestone is due to the fact that these agencies require several years of audited tax statements for eligibility for bidding processes. 

Our key customers are conflict-affected communities in which former participants in the conflict and victims of that conflict live together under conditions of heightened insecurity. We deliver our services to them through partnerships with local, established NGOs, direct fieldwork and action by the Corioli Institute team, and through remote methodologies. 

The Corioli Institute is an embedded social enterprise with a market intermediary model. We sell our products to governments (through grant applications) and compete for private grants and donor funding. The startup costs in 2023 were privately funded, and though we have a robust grant application pipeline in progress, all applications currently out are still pending decision. Current operations are funded by private donations. ($6,000 in 2023, and $25,000 thus far in 2024). The UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship grant that served as the catalyst for the "Trust After Betrayal" project that laid the groundwork for the Institute was 1.2 million GBP. We will continue to actively apply for governmental and foundation funding opportunities and, within the next five years, engage a full-time development professional to work towards an endowment that can sustain basic operating and development (grant writing and donor relations) costs over the long term. Furthermore, we are in the initial stages of developing two executive education programs certificate in "Environmental Peacebuilding" and "Reinsertion and Reintegration of Justice-Involved and Formerly Armed Actors." We will seek accreditation and the purpose of these programs is to build a service subsidization component into our business model to secure independently managed revenue generation streams.