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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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Practitioner Guidelines on the Integration of Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation into Sector-Based Programs
Disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) are important elements of sustainable development and human security, and if not successfully implemented then disaster and climate change losses will continue to undermine human developmen
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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
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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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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 Urban Resilience: Principles, Tools and Practice. Managing the risks of disasters in East Asia and the Pacific
This Handbook is a resource for enhancing disaster resilience in urban areas. It summarizes the guiding principles, tools and practice in key economic sectors that can facilitate the implementation of resilience concepts into decisions over infrastructure
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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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Situation Analysis of Children and Poverty in Uganda: Voices of Children
Commissioned by UNICEF, this report examines the situation of children living in poverty in Uganda and what the children had to say about their lives in general and their specific experiences of poverty. The report strives to identify the vulnerabilities
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Country Risk Reduction Profile: Disaster Risk Reduction in Indonesia
Children and their communities in Indonesia are among the most vulnerable in the world to the effects of natural and man-made disasters. The country is regularly subjected to a wide range of disasters stemming from climate change and environmental degrada
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Country Risk Reduction Profile: Disaster Risk Reduction in Nepal
Nepal is at the mercy of significant natural hazards, and The UNDP report ‘National Strategy for Disaster Risk Management in Nepal' ranks the country very high in terms of vulnerability to natural calamities. Save the Children's programmes in Nepal focus
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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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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
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Adaptation and Disaster Risk Management in the Pacific
A paper that addresses Small Island developing states (SIDS) ongoing projects and projects in the pipeline targeted at implementing adaptation measures. In the Pacific alone there have been a range of such initiatives starting with the Pacific Islands Cli