Building Resilience – Crisis, Coping and Change

To date the approach to Resilience for humanitarian programming has focused on the LRRD concept – extending it to the phases that a person / household passes through within Relief, Recovery & Development. Rather than a Humanitarian Programme, for an integrated programme of this nature the focus should be on “humane” programming, with resilience being built in stages:
1. Live-saving: where an immediate intervention is required to simply save a life (e.g. immediate food & nutrition aid)
2. Life-preserving: where we are looking to reduce the risk to a person’s life once it has been “saved” (e.g. health & hygiene interventions directly designed to reduce disease & contagion)
3. Life-sustaining: when the immediate risks to life have been mitigated and we can focus on recovery & rehabilitation (e.g. family livelihoods; looking to build resilience of the family beyond a single season)
4. Life-enhancing: Once a family has some degree of certainty (resilience) over food & income then the focus can move to quality of life (the D in LRRD)
Resilience, as a new concept rather than a new word, is related to a person’s & a household’s ability to cope with crisis (and then linking to a community’s & economy’s); and as such it is a phase in the development cycle rather than a standalone outcome.

Building Resilience & Humanitarian Preparedness - The Readiness approach focuses on the Theories of Change for the three programmes – building the Staff, Systems and Structure so that the capacity exists to increase services should the demand increase. This application of a Resilience Theory of Change is based on integrated programming. Drawing on the research conducted in the aftermath of the 2011/12 drought in East Africa, which defined resilience in a humanitarian context as “the ability of an individual, a household or a community exposed to hazard to withstand, adapt to and recover from the effects of the hazard in a timely and efficient manner”.
When building resilience in a humanitarian context it is vital that the relief acts as an accelerator to existing longer-term programming and not simply as a standalone intervention.