Build resilience to combat poverty

RIGHT now, millions of people are suffering from disasters around the world: The civil war in Syria, earthquakes in Pakistan, flooding in Sudan, landslides in Mexico, cyclones in China, and hunger in the Sahel region of Africa.

It may seem like a never-ending cycle. It is easy to get downhearted and think that there is no solution, that disasters are inevitable and increasing in frequency, and that aid agencies are responding as best they can but, ultimately, there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. But there is.

The first important thing to recognise is that these disasters disproportionately affect the world’s poorest people, and that the risks they face are a significant factor in keeping them poor.

When a massive earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, the people who lived in poorly constructed homes on steep hillsides, where homes and land were cheapest, were more likely to lose their homes, even their lives. They were also the least prepared to cope when a crisis hit.

The sheer complexity of the problems people face is what makes poverty so difficult to tackle. Aid agencies and governments have long recognised this phenomenon, and now have come up with new ways to address it.

We are all exposed in some way to hazards in our lives, but what turns a hazard into a disaster is people’s vulnerability. Recognising that the poor are more vulnerable, more exposed, and less able to cope has led aid agencies to focus on what people really need most in a crisis: Community resilience.

Community resilience is the ability of a community, household or individual to anticipate, respond to, cope with, and recover from the effects of shocks, and to adapt to stresses in a timely and effective manner without compromising their long-term prospects of moving out of poverty. Building resilience can take many forms. The effect of shocks can be reduced if people can anticipate them with early warning systems, and have contingency plans in place in the event of something happening. When a disaster does strike, the response should be appropriate and help people “build back better”.

Resilience can also be built by helping communities to adapt to stresses. Aid agencies are making more of an effort to predict, and adapt to, long-term change. We recognise that many of these changes are beyond our immediate control, such as climate change and global economic change, and that there is much that we cannot predict. Therefore, we need to learn how to adapt to the unpredictable.

In Kenya, successive droughts from 2006 to 2009 caused widespread hunger in the northern dryland areas, leaving families destitute and wiping out their ability to respond to future disasters. In response, Concern worked to build community resilience by running an integrated programme in Moyale District that introduced new farming techniques, improved animal health, increased access to water, strengthened the local health centres, improved co-ordination and responded quickly when warning signs were triggered. When drought struck northern Kenya again in 2010, some districts saw levels of severe malnutrition rise threefold from early 2010 to early 2011. In Moyale, however, levels of severe malnutrition were recorded as being 50% lower in 2011 than in 2010.

We must address the underlying causes of risk and poverty through long-term development work, helping people build up enough resources to be able to “weather future storms”. We must also tackle unequal power dynamics that leave some people in greater need than others, and build up the governance institutions necessary to achieve resilience. What is different about focusing on building resilience is that it requires aid agencies, development NGOs, and governments to bring together two things that have often been kept apart — emergency response and long-term development.

Governments need to be flexible when supporting such efforts, and recognise that preventing disasters from happening is far more cost-effective than responding to them. The general public needs to recognise this too. Everyone feels moved to respond to a disaster, but we hope that people will also recognise the importance of supporting projects that work to prevent shocks and stresses becoming disasters. This work is mostly carried out quietly and without media fanfare, so it falls beneath most people’s radar.

We must all learn lessons from the past and apply new and innovative approaches to break the cycle of extreme poverty wherever is is possible. Building resilience is a vital first step.

* Dom Hunt is Disaster Risk Reduction Adviser with Concern Worldwide. He will host a free public talk on Global Disasters in Cork City Central Library at 7.30pm on Oct 15 to mark International Day for Disaster Reduction on Oct13.