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Resilience
Children are living today in a more complex world and fast changing environment. While access to health and education has improved and poverty reduced in the last 15 years, inequalities are on the rise, more than 50% of the world’s population live in fast growing cities and the world is increasingly threatened by conflicts, climate change and environmental degradation.
To adapt to such disruptive environment, the concept of resilience has emerged in the last decade and Save the Children has identified “resilience” as one of its 3 main cross-cutting topics for its 2030 global strategy. Resilience is commonly defined as a complex multi-dimensional and dynamic ability embedded in individual or complex system that emerges at time of shocks, stresses and trauma. For Save the Children, resilience is the ability of children, families and systems to protect and safeguard all children against shocks and stresses in order to ensure the realisation of their rights to survival, development, education and protection.
The resilience of a child, family or a community with respect to potential hazard events and threats is determined by the degree to which they have the necessary resources (physical, social, financial, human, natural) to maintain their development and keep planning for their future projects and plans despite shocks, stresses and adversities.
Our DRR and CCA work are important factors of building resilience, but ensuring also that basic needs are met and that children have access to education, health services and opportunities for play and social interaction is critical. Efforts to strengthen families is a priority, as it is widely acknowledged that a loving and caring family is one of the key protective factors which can strengthen a child’s resilience and support their healthy development in spite of a crisis.
Effective resilience supposes a transformation, putting issues of people, power and politics at the centre of the change process. Because vulnerabilities and risk are rooted in deprivation, inequalities and human rights violation, resilience is thereby built by influencing policies that relate to power imbalances in society that encourage, create and sustain vulnerabilities.
For example, Save the Children’s Child Rights Governance work contributes to resilience of institutions by institutionalizing children’s rights in governance systems and mechanisms enabling the fulfilment of children’s rights in all contexts. Moreover, improved transparency, participation and accountability and fair (re)distribution of resources is supporting a healthy social contract between citizens and government and can prevent conflict.
Photo: Hedinn Halldorsson/Save the Children
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Comprehensive School Safety: A Toolkit for Development and Humanitarian Actors in the Education Sector
This toolkit is intended for education sector planners, policy-makers and program developers as well as humanitarian assistance providers, and advocates of universal education. It is intended to be useful for developing disaster resilience through the cor
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Staying Alive and Well: Child health and disaster risk reduction
Children are particularly vulnerable to disasters. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) is any activity carried out by a village, community, aid agency or government that helps to prepare for, mitigate, adapt to or increase resilience towards the impact of disas
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Traditional Games for Child Protection- Terre des hommes
A handbook of games developed out of experience gained by organisers and trainers of the Terre des hommes MOVE project in Romania, Moldavia and Albania. This booklet is aimed to strengthen youngsters' life skills of cooperation, responsibility, flexibilit
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The Economics of Early Response and Disaster Resilience: Lessons from Kenya and Ethiopia
In 2010 natural disasters affected more than 217 million people, killed more than 297,000 people and caused $123.9 billion in economic damages. The types, dimensions, and dynamics of humanitarian crises are further increasing, in some cases exponentially.
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Tackling the limits to adaptation: An international framework to address ‘Loss And Damage’ from climate change impacts
The current and future scale of climate change implies serious loss and damage, especially to the lives and livelihoods of those who are poor, most vulnerable and least to blame. Still developed country governments are failing to act with sufficient emiss
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Ending the everyday emergency: Resilience and children in the Sahel
More than 1 million children face severe and life-threatening malnutrition in the Sahel region of West Africa in 2012. "Ending the Everyday Emergency" demonstrates that shortage of food deficit is only part of the crisis. Even more important is a ‘resilie
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Together we march: Leveraging local funds through strategic alliances for disaster risk reduction
This document reports on a project titled 'A Disaster Resilient Future: Mobilising Communities and Institutions for Effective Risk Reduction', which aims to support and complement strategies that enable local communities to better prepare for, mitigate an
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Toward Resilience: A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation
Toward Resilience: A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation is an introductory resource for staff of development and humanitarian organizations working with people whose lives and rights are threatened by disasters and climate chan
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Child Friendly Spaces: A structured review of the current evidence base
Child Friendly Spaces (CFSs) are a widely used tool to help support and protect children in the context of emergencies. Sometimes called Safe Spaces, Child Centered Spaces and Emergency Spaces for Children, CFSs are used by a growing number of agencies as
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Building Protection and Resilience: Synergies for child protection systems and children affected by HIV and AIDS. Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT) on Children and HIV and AIDS
This paper presents findings from a study commissioned by the Inter Agency Task Team on Children affected by HIV and AIDS. The study aims to better understand the ways in which child protection systems can respond to the needs of children living with and
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Horn of Africa Two Years On Report: Response and Resilience in East Africa
In 2011, in the midst of the devastating Horn of Africa drought, Save the Children launched the largest ever multi-country humanitarian response covering three countries: Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, the most severely impacted by the drought. Thousands of
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In Double Jeopardy: Adolescent Girls and Disasters (Because I am a Girl: The State of the World's Girls 2013)
Plan International has released the seventh report in its annual State of the World’s Girls series. ‘In Double Jeopardy: Adolescent Girls and Disasters'. This year's report looks at what happens to adolescent girls in disasters and why. Using original res