Solutions
Developed and tested in the rescue and recovery phases of four major disasters in three countries, Huairou’s disaster–to-development strategy leads to social innovation, efficient use of local resources, transformation of social and political agendas, and the deepening of a participatory government.

Its strategy, piloted by Swayam Shiksham Prayog and hundreds of grassroots women’s organizations in India, is simple: Engage the full partnership of local people who tend to be intimately knowledgeable about community needs and resources.  Grassroots women are particularly valuable to this practice.

Huairou's process, refined in Maharasthra, India; Marmara, Turkey; Gujarat, India; and on the north coast of Honduras, is empowerment:

• grassroots women gather
• they identify their problems
• they work together, with others in the community and with other grassroots groups to create solutions
• they negotiate partnerships
• they implement solutions
• they continue assuming new roles of leadership and responsibility
• they teach other groups what they’ve learned

The Huairou process has a lasting effect. Grassroots women become social and politically integrated into positions of greater responsibility and authority in the local community and its governance, while the community as a whole develops a culture of resourcefulness.