Full Frame: Whitney Gantt and Allison Huggins – Global Resilience Challenge Winners

Full Frame

Whitney Gantt and Allison Huggins: Global Resilience Challenge Winners

Developing resilience in places like West Africa where war threatens access to food, or in Southeast Asia where typhoons plague farmers, can seem like an impossible task, but eight teams, from around the globe, are tackling some of the world’s most difficult challenges. 

The groups recently won grants from the first Global Resilience Challenge.  It means they will each bring home up to a million dollars to implement and strengthen their solutions to these regional problems. 

Full Frame: Whitney Gantt and Allison Huggins – Global Resilience Challenge Winners

Developing resilience in places like West Africa where war threatens access to food, or in Southeast Asia where typhoons plague farmers, can seem like an impossible task, but eight teams, from around the globe, are tackling some of the world’s most difficult challenges.

Leaders from two of those winning teams joined May Lee in our Los Angeles studio. Whitney Gantt is Grameen Foundation’s global director for mobile agriculture.  Her team plans to help coconut farmers in the Philippines.

“What our program is looking to do is to partner with public and private sector players to build resiliency of those coconut farmers,” explained Gantt.

And Allison Huggins joins the conversation from Rabat, Morocco.  She is the country director at Mercy Corps in Mali. 

“We were thrilled to be a part of the Global Resilience Challenge and to be able to work with other organizations that are using similar holistic approaches and really looking at the systems that people live in and how can we have more of a broader, systemic, holistic impact to help people,” said Huggins.

Her team plans to use its winnings to financially help communities in the fragile drylands of Africa.