IWMI’s Frontlines Learning Exchange Expands in 2026 to Explore Food System Resilience Beyond Conflict Zones

September 2026 — The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has expanded its Frontlines Learning Exchange (FLEX) webinar series in 2026, broadening its focus beyond fragile and conflict-affected settings to encompass urban and peri-urban food systems and island contexts, as the initiative continues to draw practical lessons on food system resilience from the communities living through the toughest challenges.

Background

As climate shocks intensify, cities expand, conflicts reshape livelihoods, and islands confront mounting environmental pressures, food systems worldwide are being tested in unprecedented ways. Yet some of the most valuable lessons for building resilience emerge from the very places facing these challenges most acutely — where people are not waiting for ideal conditions, but adapting, innovating, and finding new ways to sustain livelihoods, strengthen food security, and manage risk daily.

Recognizing and learning from these lived experiences is at the heart of FLEX, launched in 2025 by IWMI under the CGIAR Food Frontiers and Security Program. The series was created as a platform where researchers, community leaders, humanitarian practitioners, local governments, entrepreneurs and development partners could exchange experiences on what is working — and what still needs to change — in some of the world’s most dynamic and vulnerable contexts.

Lessons from the First Year

In its inaugural year, FLEX focused primarily on fragile and conflict-affected settings, bringing forward concrete stories rather than abstract frameworks. Participants shared accounts of youth-led efforts in Nigeria that turned water challenges into energy and nutrient solutions, collaborative flood mapping in Ethiopia blending drone technology with local knowledge, inclusive irrigation approaches tested in refugee-hosting areas of Jordan and Lebanon, and disaster-risk management tools helping communities in Nepal and Zambia ease tensions over land and water resources.

Michael Scheibenreif, Program Manager of UNICEF’s African Drone and Data Academy, described youth drone training during one of the webinars: “So we now train youth in how to build drones, pilot them, maintain them, how to use them for transport, image acquisition, and how to use AI techniques in order to harvest data that’s relevant for UNICEF programs.”

These sessions were not curated success stories presented from afar, but lived experiences of people navigating compounding risks — climate stress layered on displacement, resource scarcity, market disruption and fragmented governance. What emerged was a clear pattern: technical solutions matter, but they only travel when grounded in trust, local leadership, gender-responsive approaches, and financing models that bridge humanitarian response and longer-term development. Those lessons are now feeding into how the CGIAR Food Frontiers and Security Program works, helping ensure evidence from fragile contexts informs strategy across its three frontier areas.

Expanding the Frontier in 2026

FLEX 2026 broadens its focus beyond fragile and conflict-affected settings to include urban and peri-urban food systems and island contexts. While these three frontier spaces differ in many respects, they face remarkably similar pressures from climate and environmental stresses, resource scarcity, market disruptions, migration, shifting diets and fragmented governance — while also serving as hubs of innovation and adaptation, where communities, governments, researchers and businesses continuously develop practical solutions to navigate uncertainty.

Rather than promoting one-size-fits-all solutions, FLEX seeks to understand how lessons can travel across contexts while remaining grounded in local realities, while also strengthening relationships among the diverse actors working at the frontier of food-system transformation.

Looking Ahead

The FLEX 2026 series continues its interactive format of panels and peer-learning dialogues rather than one-way presentations. Upcoming discussions will explore questions including how nature-based solutions can restore climate and water resilience in fragile settings, what “food of the future” looks like in low-resource environments, how early warning and anticipatory action can strengthen pastoral systems, what responsible innovation scaling looks like amid instability, and how foresight and rapid-response modelling can support timely decisions.

Conclusion

The goal of FLEX remains simple but ambitious: to elevate knowledge from the frontlines, connect experiences across diverse contexts, and translate learning into action. Having demonstrated in its first year that some of the most valuable insights for food system transformation already exist in the places facing the toughest challenges, FLEX 2026 aims to amplify those voices further, connecting communities across fragile, urban and island contexts to build pathways toward more resilient and food-secure futures. Webinars can be registered for or watched on demand through the Frontlines Learning Exchange platform.