Gender and Youth Activity (GAYA) Cultivating Inclusion for Food Security (Cultivate) Fellowship

Application Deadline: April 5, 2024

Brought to you by the Gender and Youth Activity (GAYA), the Cultivate Fellowship is a capacity-strengthening opportunity for field-based emergency and resilience food security implementers who are interested in using qualitative methods to increase gender and youth inclusion. 

Over three months, a cohort of 16-20 members participate in both an in-person workshop, regular online meetings, and independent work to develop innovative solutions to increase gender and youth inclusion in their programs. 

The Cultivate Fellowship supports fellows to design and use qualitative methods to address their program-specific questions and deepen their contextual understanding of social inclusion and resilience dynamics of their activities, in order to adapt programming for transformative change. By the end of the Cultivate Fellowship, fellows will:

• Collaborate with peers and explore how systems thinking tools and strategies can deepen our understanding of inclusive resilience dynamics.
• Design learning questions, a qualitative inquiry process, and qualitative inquiry tools to answer program-specific questions.
• Conduct this qualitative inquiry within their own program, including:
  • Collecting data;
  • Analyzing results; 
  • Convening a team to apply learning within the program; and
  • Revising the tools for broader use. 
• Engage with a robust Alumni Network committed to creative, collaborative, and critical innovation around inclusive resilience-focused qualitative inquiry.

Requirements

Prospective applicants should apply as a pair working within the same program, ideally representing: 

• Applicant 1: Gender, youth, and/or social inclusion components or the equivalent 
• Applicant 2: Monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) and/or collaboration, learning, and adaptation (CLA) or adaptive management equivalent

The current cohort is aimed at implementers working on Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA)-funded Activities and other USAID strategic partners located in Asia and the Pacific.

Expectations

• Fellows’ program/activity will fund travel costs  (e.g., travel, accommodation, per diem) associated with attending an in-person workshop
• Fellows will engage in three months of activities, including, but not limited to, virtual preparatory meetings, a 5-day in-person workshop, biweekly virtual meetings following the workshop, informal and formal technical mentorship calls, and a virtual learning event 
• During the Fellowship, Fellows (with the support of GAYA) will be required to complete an inclusive resilience-focused qualitative inquiry project within their program/activity.

Timeline:

• Application launches March 18, 2024
• Application closes April 5, 2024
• Selected fellows are notified by April 26 and must confirm their participation by May 17
• The in-person workshop will be held in early July (likely July 8-12, country TBD)

More Info: Gender and Youth Activity (GAYA) Asia/Pacific Region Cultivate Fellowship