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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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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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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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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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Changing climate, Changing disasters: Pathways towards integration
A guide from the Strengthening Climate Resilience consortium (IDS, Plan and Christian Aid), focusing on a Climate Smart Disaster Risk Management (CSDRM) approach that offers different ‘routes’ to integration (and indicators to track progress) for agencies
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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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Evaluation of Child friendly spaces: Ethiopia Field Study Summary Report
World Vision International and Columbia University have begun a series of structured evaluations of CFS (Child Friendly Spaces) interventions in various contexts, to document evidence of protective and restorative effectiveness and to identify good practi
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Livelihoods at the limit: Reducing the risk of disasters and adapting to climate change. Evidence from the consolidated Household Economy Analysis database
This report draws on the compiled Household Economy Analysis dataset and analysis tools to answer some of the most pressing questions about disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in a range of livelihood contexts:- Which single shock has th
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Reducing Risks, Saving Lives. Save the Children's approach to Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation
Disasters have the biggest impact on the poorest and most vulnerable people, and it is children who bear the brunt. Over the past two decades, the number of natural disasters has doubled. Children’s lives are also threatened by epidemiological disasters,
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Building Community Resilience to Climate Change: Testing the Adaptation Coalition Framework in Latin America
This paper presents the Adaptation Coalition Framework (ACF), the goal of which is to address challenges presented by climate change that many other current climate adaptation models and sustainable development frameworks do not completely address. It ind
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The Adaptation Coalition Toolkit Building Community Resilience to Climate Change
This adaptation coalition toolkit was developed to promote the strategic empowerment of people by creating more inclusive, cohesive, and accountable societies in the face of climate change. Its purpose is to guide facilitating groups or teams of developme
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Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami emergency response and recovery program. Six-month report 2011
It is now six months since a major earthquake and tsunami hit the northeastern coast of Japan on March 11. The scale of this disaster, compounded by the subsequent nuclear crisis in Fukushima, was unprecedented. The government of Japan met many of the pop