Resilience

Huairou Commission invests in grassroots women-led community resilience initiatives that advance community development priorities while reducing the impacts of natural hazards and climate change

Development deficits in low income, resource-poor urban and rural settlements leave communities highly vulnerable to natural hazards and climate change.

Grassroots women live and work in these settlements with regular exposure to climate change and natural hazards that have devastating effects on community livelihoods. Over time, grassroots women have developed a practical knowledge base of working at a community level in a way that promotes sustainable development while working to reduce risks to climate change and natural disasters.

Organized grassroots women’s groups have incorporated this knowledge into their livelihood practices. Using tested strategies and innovative approaches, they position themselves as agents of resilience and pursue long term planning for sustainable bottom-up development.

Grassroots organizations advancing community resilience found that crises represent opportunities for grassroots women to demonstrate their leadership as they direct and distribute relief, restore livelihoods, rebuild homes and negotiate with the government on behalf of their communities. In this regard, the leaders:

Leverage their constituencies, capacities and networks to advocate with local, sub-national and national governments to scale their work
Promote devolution of power and decision making at grassroots level
Position themselves as community resource persons, local trainers, and advisors to local governments in building community resilience

In taking on public leadership roles, grassroots women re-position themselves as leaders and innovators in the eyes of their families, communities and governments. Building community resilience empowers grassroots women to advance sustainable development in ways that reduce community risks and vulnerabilities to natural hazards and climate change.

The Huairou Commission believes in grassroots women as actors of community resilience and supports organized grassroots women’s groups by:

Financing grassroots-driven disaster and climate resilient initiatives
Facilitating technical assistance and peer exchanges to deepen practices, connect groups and scale up and transfer effective grassroots initiatives
Providing opportunities to engage and partner with decision makers
Enabling grassroots women to directly engage policymakers

Looking ahead, we continue to scale our effort and partnerships in pursuit of a substantial paradigm shift in the development world to facilitate more direct funding access to grassroots organization. In this regard, we are working with global partners and allies, including Slum Dwellers International, International Institute for Environment and Development, Climate Justice Resilience Fund and Global Resilience Partnership to build a Frontiers Fund Accelerator that would:

Support grassroots groups to build governance and operational capacities that can enable larger amounts of funding to scale their initiatives
Support global and national funders build awareness and support among their peers for these initiatives
Collaborate to establish internal policies and practices that facilitate delivering larger funding levels to grassroots communities to reduce vulnerabilities

The partners in this initiative have identified lines of action intended to build coalitions and partnerships between grassroots social movements and financial actors that accelerate shifts in the flow of investments and establish mechanisms that enable collaboration in building the resilience of communities and ecosystems.

Zimbabwe, Africa

In 2017, four governments at the local and national level in Zimbabwe have approached the Zimbabwe Parents of Handicapped Children Association (ZPHCA) requesting engagement and expertise of grassroots practitioners as policy advisors in resilience planning. As a result of the involved womens’ advocacy, four grassroots women were appointed into the Local Authority Decision Making Forums. In 2018, 12 grassroots women leaders were co-opted into the Local Authorities Monthly All Stakeholders Consultative Forums covering five local authorities where they played an oversight and advisory role.

Central America

In Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua grassroots women’s groups have organized themselves to prevent the gender-based impacts of disasters on their families and communities. Officials from Central American disaster management agencies along with the Regional Coordination for the Prevention of Natural Disasters in Central America (CEPREDNAC) publicly acknowledged how working with grassroots leaders of local organizations over a period of 5-7 years has transformed their ability to understand and facilitate the formal participation of women and their community organizations in effective disaster risk reduction efforts. CEPREDENAC, appointed one woman from each country in Central America to the Regional Disaster Risk Reduction Platform and 150 women (30 in each of the 5 countries from the region) to be trained in GIS mapping by their respective national disaster management agencies. These women will then be certified as grassroots disaster risk reduction managers affiliated with their respective National Disaster Management Agencies.

Over the years building on the grassroots women leaders’ experiences of local development realities, we worked with grassroots women leaders and their technical allies to design a Community Resilience Fund (CRF) – a flexible financing mechanism that has over ten years channeled funds to community resilience building initiatives led by organized grassroots women’s groups.CRF has also financed grassroots women’s abilities to transfer and aggregate their work through exchanges, build coalitions with other civil society organizations and networks and leverage their work to advocate with government institutions to formally recognize and resource grassroots women’s resilience practices. The CRF is monitored at local level by leaders themselves, and at global levels at annual review meetings, where it is evaluated in terms of successes and risks, and opportunities to further scale. In this way Huairou Commission facilitates grassroots women leaders sharing their experiences in CRF administration in communities and furthers their capacity enhancement in designing and implementing community driven development programs.

Learn more about CRF

At the policy and advocacy level, Huairou Commission has facilitated creation of the Community Practitioners Platform on Resilience (CPPR). It was established in 2010 as a global mechanism for organized communities living and working in disaster prone urban and rural areas to play an active role in implementing the Sendai Framework and drive disaster and climate resilience agendas at local, national and global level. The CPPR is a common platform for community practitioners to collectively develop advocacy agendas and engage policy makers and a network of institutional collaborators prepared to champion community-led action. As a grassroots networking and advocacy space formally endorsed by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), it enhances the visibility of community-led innovations, particularly those that can be scaled up through partnerships with governments at local, national, and regional levels. The CPPR holds a seat on the Sendai Stakeholders Engagement Mechanism as an official Sendai Framework and UN DRR partner.

Learn more about CPPR