The road to resilience – bridging relief and development for a more sustainable future

This document presents IFRC’s definition of and perspectives on resilience. It presents resilience as the ability of individuals, communities, organisations or countries exposed to disasters, crises and underlying vulnerabilities to anticipate, reduce the impact of, cope with, and recover from the effects of adversity without compromising their long term prospects.
The document includes an example from Burundi, which illustrates the value of grass-roots network in building community resilience: a visible, widespread impact on communities’ resilience in the face of the potential risk for future ethnic violence, current and future food insecurity and the challenges of inadequate community services.
IFRC is further developing and improving its resilience approaches and programming by combining the humanitarian concern for imminent threats with the sustainable and longer-term approaches and institutional strengthening traditionally associated with development.