What is resilience?
Christian Aid’s goal is to empower people to live with dignity, able to respond successfully to disasters, risks and opportunities. There are different types of risk, and building resilience supports individuals’ and communities’ capacity to anticipate, organise for and adapt to change.
Why resilience?
Poverty, inequality and vulnerability are inextricably linked: poor people face disproportionate exposure to a variety of risks and pressures – from natural disasters to gender discrimination – which limits their ability to improve their lives.
They often lack the power to make decisions that would help them adapt to continual change and exploit its potential benefits. Christian Aid’s corporate strategy, Partnership for Change, aims to change this by putting power into the hands of poor and marginalised people.
Our Resilience Framework
Building on the Thriving Resilient Livelihoods framework, published in 2012, our updated Resilience Framework demonstrates how building resilience supports communities and individuals to assess and manage the risks that threaten them while making the most of opportunities that arise.
To address these risks, the framework integrates different programme interventions, such as disaster risk reduction, community health, shifting power relations and inclusive market development.
At the core of the framework is our belief that individual and community resilience can be enhanced by empowering poor and vulnerable women and men, boys and girls to manage risks and improve their wellbeing, allowing them to live with dignity. Through our framework, our programmes and partners can support local communities and individuals to:
• identify risks and pressures
• act on their own behalf
• exercise their rights
• access resources
• respond appropriately and effectively to achieve sustainable results.
Our experience shows that a holistic, adaptive and integrated approach – in other words, one that can respond rapidly to change, and covers disaster risk reduction, access to health services and adaptation to climate change simultaneously – is required. Brokering relationships between stakeholders and integrating expertise is key to our resilience approach and also integral to achieving the sustainable development goals. This process must be inclusive and accountable, and led by people and communities.
The wider the network, and the better the integration of resources and expertise from many fields of work, the greater the impact on poverty. This leads to sustainable, long-term solutions. We see resilience both as a process (steps taken to achieve an end) and an outcome (an end result).
Our Resilience Framework recognises that we work at different levels: global, national, regional, district and with individual households. All levels are dynamically linked and influence how communities and individuals experience vulnerability to risk.
The framework is equally applicable across each of the levels.
Case studies
The following nine case studies illustrate how we interpret resilience – as a means of putting communities and individuals at the centre of their own development. They embody the principles of the Resilience Framework, and put the risks and opportunities it addresses into context; these have been broadly classified under six themes. The stories showcase different aspects of our approach, but share a common theme of empowerment, participation and inclusiveness.
The first three case studies demonstrate the principles of the Resilience Framework. Community-led participatory vulnerability and capacity assessments (PVCAs) is exemplified by initiatives to facilitate inclusive decision making in Burkina Faso and Bolivia (p7), while schemes to provide women with access to quality land in Mali, and to address land insecurity among the urban poor in the Philippines, embody power, gender and inclusion (p9). Accountability is highlighted by community-led work in the occupied Palestinian territory, where the inclusive PVCA process, adapted to local context, has encouraged communities to develop coalitions to strengthen advocacy work (p11).