ARISE co-researchers: Working collaboratively to build capacity
One of our core strategies to affect change is to support capacity strengthening of urban marginalised co-researchers to generate, collect, and use evidence as new localised knowledge to instigate change.
Strengthening capabilities of urban marginalised people to engage with research processes is central to the principles of CBPR and meaningful participation of marginalised communities. ARISE envisions that strengthening co-researcher capacities built using a CBPR approach to generate new knowledge can contribute to enabling pathways to impact, such as co-production of plans to improve health and wellbeing with both formal and informal governance allies.
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) lies at the heart of the ARISE approach to catalyse a step change in approaches to improving accountability and promoting the wellbeing and health and of urban marginalised people living and working in informal urban spaces. The ARISE approach focuses on harnessing and strengthening the capacities of urban marginalised people to identify, analyse and communicate their experiences of intersecting inequities,
well-being, health and governance, and to build alliances for new governance arrangements.
ARISE anticipated outcomes focus on achieving changes in relationships, action and understanding. In all action sites, ARISE has recruited community members as ‘co-researchers’,
who are partnering with professional researchers and community development organisations across all stages of the research process, including collecting and analysing data from group participatory methods and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping. This Story of Change highlights emerging outcomes of this process in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Freetown, Sierra Leone.