August 2023 Monthly Collaboration Meeting Report

The meeting was held virtually on August 17, 2023, and was attended by representatives from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the FEWS NET Early Warning team, the Learning and Data Hub team, the Food, Nutrition, and Livelihood Security team, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Science team. The Hub team collaborated with all pillars on Joint Annual Work Planning (JAWP) activities, including organizing team JAWP presentations and developing an agenda for an upcoming JAWP session in September. The Hub worked with the Early Warning team to assess crop domain usability and the potential for automating and loading more data into the FEWS NET Data Warehouse (FDW). The Hub received feedback from the Early Warning team to further refine data visualizations on the fews.net website. The Hub team also worked closely with various pillars to develop learning content, including FEWS NET capacity development material, that will be posted on the FEWS NET Learning Platform (FLP). The Hub and Early Warning team collaborated on the development of training modules designed specifically for USAID's Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA). Both teams worked to craft processes, templates, and resources to streamline future learning content development. The Early Warning team noted successful collaboration with the Hub to develop BHA training modules. With the Science team, ongoing discussions have centered around how to best roll out information and activities that were agreed upon at the Science Meeting in Boulder, Colorado, in addition to planning for upcoming alerts and joint statements related to El Niño forecasts. The Early Warning team also received support from the Science team related to analysis of planted areas in Sudan. The Science team is preparing to celebrate the 11th anniversary of its monthly seasonal forecast presentations, and the August presentation successfully synthesized a variety of agroclimatology information from numerous FEWS NET science partner organizations. The development of regional agroclimatology profiles continues to involve cross-pillar collaboration, and a request for crop area analysis by the Early Warning team is being addressed by Science team partners. The Hub team shared ongoing points of collaboration across its data, documentation, branding, communications, learning, knowledge and learning, and website work streams that will continue into IY5. The following planned and proposed collaboration activities were shared: data transition, documentation development, branding implementation, communications development, learning process documentation, knowledge and learning documentation, and website development. The Early Warning team shared proposed IY5 activities that are currently under discussion, including website content improvements, management, and maintenance, CMS updates and improvements, support transitioning M&T products to D9 CMS, development of blog process and review, and development of communication strategy for alerts and other products.