Alleviating the effects of drought requires more than food and water. The Somalia Resilience Program was founded after the 2011 famine in the Horn of Africa, in which a quarter of a million people died, half of them children under five. Research showed that pastoral families with alternative income or assets lose fewer animals in a drought than those without. So the group encouraged local women to join Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs).
Some savers bought animals during the dry season, when food was short and herders would sell at low prices – and then sold them in the wet season, when the price could be eight times as high. When local people returned from a refugee camp in Kenya, some of the savers donated money to help the returnees re-establish.
“We try to build resilience so that, even if there is a drought, this does not necessarily mean there’s a famine,” said Georgina Jordan, Quality Assurance and Knowledge Manager at the Somalia Resilience Program. “You might lose parts of your income, but you don’t lose all of it.”
Resilience promotion is becoming increasingly important as climate change triggers more frequent and more severe droughts, extreme weather conditions and rising oceans. The consequences – death, damage and disrupted supplies of food, water, and energy – especially hit poor people in developing countries. They tend to live in places more exposed to climate risks; they have fewer resources enabling them to adapt to changing conditions or recover from disasters; and their governments often lack the capacity to respond.
EU development assistance focuses on building capacity, so that governments and communities can help themselves. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed in September 2015 placed particular emphasis on resilience. Goals 9 and 11 specifically called for infrastructure and cities to be made resilient – but resilience is a part of almost all of them, in particular the provision of food, water and energy.
Resilience building demands thinking in new ways about how to help, and faces several challenges. Cholera is difficult and costly to treat through a humanitarian operation. However, cholera can be prevented if people treat their water with chlorine tablets, which are very cheap. So in Uganda, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre uses forecast-based financing. If there’s a flood warning, it will distribute chlorine tablets, even though only half the warnings are followed by an actual flood, and two out of three big floods trigger a cholera outbreak. Even if the tablets turn out not to be needed, they might be next time.
“Traditionally, humanitarian donors have only made their money available after a shock has already occurred,” said Maarten van Aalst, Director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “In the worst cases we saw children on the front of the western newspapers, and that’s when the money would start flowing. We now know there are so many interventions that we can trigger beforehand if we have credible scientific information.”
Humanitarian actors tend to focus on events in a single place, but resilience can only be built by looking at wider problems, such as the changing risks from climate change, population growth and migration. “A local community facing a flood danger is not just an isolated community,” said van Aalst. “It’s affected by deforestation upstream. If you want to build resilience for that community, you need to look at the entire watershed, rather than just locally.”
But resilience also needs strong local actors. Many local organisations are started by members of a community in response to a problem that arises there. The founders are part of the community, and they often understand the context, underlying causes and the kind of solution that will work. “You are not going to build resilience in London for people in Kenya,” said Degan Ali, Executive Director of African Development Solutions (Adeso). “You are only going to do proper resilience building if you invest in local capital – in local human, environmental assistance.”
It’s relatively easy to explain to governments why they should mobilise humanitarian aid. “The reality is, that if there is a conflict, if there is a major natural disaster, common sense tells us that they should move the money,” said Claus Sørensen, Senior Adviser for Resilience, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. “They are not going to be able to spend the money on road construction or agricultural reform policy, because the country is in a crisis.”
However, when it comes to investing in resilience, persuading policy-makers to spend is more difficult. The advantages are clear: humanitarian aid is costly and typically arrives after many lives have already been lost. But governments are under pressure to show voters rapid, concrete results, and it’s tricky to persuade them to finance preventative measures.
Success stories
One way to explain the benefits of a resilience approach could be through examples of where it has been effective, said Anders Henriksson, Principal Adviser for Policy Definition in the European Commission’s Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development. “We could have people who have witnessed the experience in media, saying, ‘This helped my village. This helped our community. This helped our region.’”
One case is Ethiopia’s success in reducing child mortality, from 123 per 1,000 under-fives in 2005, to 88 in 2011. Much of the credit is given to Tedros Adhanom, Ethiopia’s health minister from 2005 to 2012, who hired and trained around 40,000 female health workers, and then dispatched them out to posts around the country. “This is magic,” said Sørensen. “This is amazing! It shows it can be done if you focus and if you have leadership. That’s a good story to tell.”
Linking humanitarian relief and development
Though resilience promotion takes a different approach from humanitarian work, experts from the humanitarian sector will still be needed, said Sørensen. Humanitarians understand food supply, for example, meaning they can help identify bottlenecks and weaknesses in things like food security and agricultural policy. And in one sense, both groups have a common aim. “Ultimately the purpose of us humanitarians working together with development actors would actually be to make ourselves superfluous,” said Sørensen. “The day we could close our boutique would be a happy day. But it’s not going to happen any time soon.”
For more information on resilience:
To learn more about the EU’s approach, see the Commission’s communication EU Approach to Resilience: Learning from Food Security Crises (COM(2012) 586 final), the Commission Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis Prone Countries 2013-2020 (SWD(2013) 227 final) and the EU handbook on operating in situations of fragility and conflict note #4. Some key concepts from the handbook are highlighted below:
Promoting resilience in situations of conflict and fragility means factoring in the state’s incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions, and the looming shadow of armed conflict.
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Visit the following groups:
- Public Group on Fragility and Crisis Situations
- Building Resilience of Small Island Economies
- EU – Resilience Building in Ethiopia (RESET)
This collaborative piece was drafted by Sebastian Moffett, with input from Stefan Agne from DEVCO and support from the capacity4dev.eu Coordination Team.
Teaser image credit: Wikimedia commons.
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