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Resilience

Resilience sqBackground: Resilience became a high priority in the face of the 2008 Food Price Crisis, climate change and its increasingly severe natural disasters such as the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa, where famine was largely averted as a result of major investments that made countries like Kenya and Ethiopia more resilient. Resilience is defined as the ability to help people withstand shocks: economic, climatic, social or political.

THP Perspective: Since the Bangladesh floods of 1990 where our Youth Ending Hunger volunteers were among the very first responders — to our work in support of community-led reconstruction in Tsunami affected villages in 2004, we’ve seen the profound difference it makes for communities to be mobilized, organized and confident in their ability to take immediate action even when no outside resources are able to reach them.

Impoverished farmers, in particular, suffer a “Food Price” crisis every single year, as prices skyrocket in the months before the harvest, and plummet right after. Our epicenter food banks in Africa are just one example of community initiatives that build resilience.

Key Interventions:

  • Animators – people on the ground with knowledge, experience and sense of responsibility
  • Participatory Local Governance, with clearly thought-out development plans
  • Disaster preparedness and planning
  • Decentralized health services, with pre-positioned supplies of items such as water purification tablets that are essential when water supplies are cut
  • Availability of affordable credit
  • Food security: storage at household and community levels.

Key messages:

  • Natural disaster need not lead to human catastrophe

Global Campaigns and Initiatives:

Key agencies:

Key reports and data sources: