Nile Basin Development Challenge

In mid 2011, Catherine Pfeifer, ILRI/IWMI researcher in the Nile Basin Development Challenge (NBDC), posed us a challenge: What kind of exercise could we do that would combine ‘expert’ knowledge of land and water practices with the needs of ‘landscapes’ and communities where these could be applied.

The result should be some validated ‘best bet’ interventions that the NBDC and its partners and communities could promote to support more resilient livelihoods in the Ethiopian highlands. Importantly, she wanted to generate ‘strategies’ combining different practices interventions for a whole ‘landscape’ (watershed) – so the combinations of practices, and any trade-offs would be important.

The outcome of this discussion was an idea borrowed from the ‘happy families’ card game (where the happiest family is the one with all the members) – a ‘happy strategies’ game in which players need to combine a set of practices into the most compatible strategy for a…