How do adaptations to COVID-19 inform strategies for enhancing local faith leadership in health and development?

The changes COVID-19 imposed on faith actors’ ways of working, while challenging, also released creativity and innovation. It opened new avenues for partnership with governments and international agencies, such as UN agencies, who recognised the importance of engaging faith actors. Yet many of these agencies missed the full potential of faith engagement, seeing it mainly as a gateway to influence communities in the short-term but not exploring deeper and more equitable partnerships with faith actors. With the evolving nature of the pandemic over the last two years, the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities (JLI) was aware that many of the experiences and lessons from faith actors were not being documented. In the light of this, JLI partnered with eight faith actors to learn together what worked and what remains to be done in terms of faith responses to COVID-19 to support better preparedness and improved partnerships in the future.

Participating faith actors:  World Evangelical Alliance; World Council of Churches; Anglican Alliance; Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation; Islamic Relief Worldwide; Humanitarian Forum Indonesia; Soka Gakkai International; and Corus International with the Africa Christian Health Associations Platform.

View the March 1, 2022, webinar that brought representatives of the faith actors who had participated in the research into dialogue with key external partners, discussing where they have seen growth and where problems remain with faith engagement.