Welcome Keynote - Day 1 (December 6, 2022)

2022 Evidence Summit for Impactful Interreligious Action Welcome Keynote with Adam Phillips. Executive Director of USAID's Local Faith and Transformative Partnerships Hub.
Many in the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding (HDP) sectors now recognize the important role religious communities, religious actors, and faith-based organizations (FBOs) play in advancing development goals and building sustainable peace. Religious communities, religious actors, and FBOs leverage their positions of trust and influence to combine long-standing relationships across the international, national, and local levels with their contextual knowledge. They are also most often the first to reach and longest to remain in hard to access communities given their status as trusted authorities and sources of information, as clearly demonstrated through the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, religious actors have come to be considered integral partners in advancing development goals.   
As we see increased partnership with religious actors and FBOs, we also see a need to bring together diverse stakeholders as a community to reflect on the advancement in partnerships and engagement between religious actors and HDP institutions, funders, and policymakers; understand multiple perspectives on what effective engagement and partnership looks like; and better understand different perspectives on the state of evidence on the role of religious actors in HDP. The 2022 Evidence Summit on Effective Inter-Religious Action will provide an opportunity for donors, faith actors and FBOs, practitioners, and policymakers alike to explore evidence on funding and partnering with local faith actors and FBOs to support more effective, whole-of-society programming and policy.