Humanitarian interventions such as the Cross-Border Community Resilience (CBCR) Activity operate within the context of diverse actors with different power positions and interests. If the CBCR Activity is to have an impact and achieve its overall goals of enhancing resilience among the Mandera cross-border communities, it is imperative that the Activity ‘thinks and works politically.’

This Applied Political Economy Analysis (APEA) helps the CBCR Activity and its implementing partners in ‘thinking politically’ or understanding the context in which the Activity will operate, and ‘working politically,’ or understanding how to navigate the risks and take advantage of the opportunities within the context to achieve Activity objectives and results. In so doing, this APEA maps and identifies 1) facilitators and disruptors in the implementation of activities, 2) the most controversial issues / topics (within the scope of the project) in decision making and in the implementation of planned activities, and 3) the windows of opportunity for the project to have an impact on decision-making and implementation. The APEA goes further to explore how the CBCR Activity will interact with the socio-economic and political conflicts in the Mandera cluster.

Overall, the political insights in this APEA are useful for political sensitive programming. The assessment considers the diverse actors within the context of the CBCR Activity, together with their positionalities as either enablers or hindrances to the Activity’s implementation. Hence, this APEA is an instrumental tool for designing programmes across the social cohesion, livelihood and natural resource management (NRM) domains that the CBCR Activity intervenes in.