Transforming Climate Resilience with a Google Ventures Sprint

CARE International is committed to strengthening climate resilience and supporting climate adaptation at a community level. CARE's Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (CVCA) participatory research tool plays a vital role in supporting communities vulnerable to climate change by better understanding the threats they are facing and how to take meaningful action to increase their climate resilience.

The challenge

CARE has ambition to scale CVCA, but the existing paper-based approach is prohibitive: it is too resource intensive, time-consuming and inconsistent—often producing incomparable results. Plus, the linear process prevented the creation of a ‘lighter-touch’ approach.

Our goal wasn’t to digitise the entire existing approach, but rather to identify the elements of CVCA to digitise that could eliminate the barriers preventing scale—without comprising the impact and depth of the process.

CARE had confronted CVCA’s challenges to scale numerous times before, so the team had a wealth of knowledge and information to start with. However, they felt fatigued by the complexity of the problem and unaligned on how to solve it.

Given the availability of information and resources, the importance of creating momentum, and the need to conclude with a tangible output, we opted to tackle this challenge with a Google Ventures sprint. This approach rapidly creates and validates an idea with real users, helping provide CARE with the alignment and confidence necessary to progress on their scale journey.

Since CARE’s team is globally distributed, we opted for a remote sprint. This requires a different approach to an in-person sprint. Staring at a Zoom screen for 8 hours a day for 5 days isn’t feasible, so we restructured the typical 5-day approach into an 8-day structure—meeting for no longer than 3 hours a day to prevent screen fatigue and maintain high engagement.

During the sprint, we identified 4 key actors within the CVCA:

• Those planning the CVCA and agreeing with the objective(s)
• Those facilitating the implementation of the participatory tools to deliver according to the priorities and objectives
• Those taking notes and recording the data during the participatory in-person research (e.g. uploading photos of work completed on paper)
• Those analysing the results and creating a CVCA report

We rapidly created a prototype of a facilitator interface designed to reduce complexity and improves the comparability of data collected across CVCAs, and tested it with existing CVCA users. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.