Olivia Wilkinson, JLI Director of Research, on CRPL Seminar Series: ‘Faith and Positive Change for Children’s Project’ Oct 2020

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About JLI

An international collaboration on evidence for faith actors’ activities, contributions, and challenges to achieving humanitarian and development goals. Founded in 2012, JLI came together with a single shared conviction: there is an urgent need to build our collective understanding, through evidence, of faith actors in humanitarianism and development.

Olivia Wilkinson gave the presentation as part of the CRPL Seminar Series on the 1st of October, 2020 via Teams.

How do United Nations agencies work with faith communities? While faith engagement in development is common to some extent, it is often short-term, ad hoc, and instrumentalising. Taking UNICEF as an example, this seminar presented on the findings and experiences from a three-year collaboration between UNICEF and the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities to review its faith engagement and set out a new way forward. The findings from a literature review, mappings, case studies, the development of a theory of change, and then implementation of workshops to test the theory, was presented. Updates that have been needed since the COVID-19 pandemic started and how this has affected UNICEF programming were considered. The presentation concluded with a review of what can be learned for UN agencies’ faith engagement in general.

Biography

Olivia Wilkinson is a sociologist of humanitarianism and religion. Her work is at the intersection of sociology of religion and international humanitarian/development studies. Her monograph has the title Secular and Religious Dynamics in Humanitarian Response. It unpicks how secularity is one of many privileges and biases in the humanitarian system that can make the distribution of aid unfair or inappropriate. She is currently the Director of Research for the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities, where she works on research projects for partners including UNICEF, UNHCR, Tearfund, and World Vision, and in collaboration with universities such as the University of Leeds and University College London. She holds a PhD and Masters in humanitarian action from Trinity College Dublin and Université catholique de Louvain, respectively. Her undergraduate degree in Theology and Religious Studies is from the University of Cambridge.