Life in the Village: A Simulation Tool

Presented by: Zachary Baquet, Knowledge Management Specialist, USAID Bureau for Food Security;  Julie MacCartee, Food Security & Agriculture Program Manager, USAID-KDMD Project, The QED Group, LLC

USAID’s Bureau for Food Security and the team behind the Agrilinks knowledge sharing portal provided an interactive demonstration of USAID’s Life in the Village simulation. This session placed participants in the role of rural households responsible for making day-to-day decisions about how to use their limited resources. The exercise aims to help program managers and implementers better visualize life for poor, food insecure households in order to lead to better program design and implementation. Attendees  gained hands-on experience with this capacity building approach through participation in a live demonstration of the simulation and discussion on how this exercise can be applied and adapted to help communicate valuable learning objectives to donors, implementers and researchers.

Resources for the simulation tool can be found on the Agrilinks website.