A group of 50 people work on restoring a 4km stretch of road in Rushanga as part of a cash-for-work initiative run by Concern to open up inaccessible areas and provide additional income for vulnerable households. In Gitega, more than 2,000 people have benefited from the community resilience programme. Photo Darren Vaughan

Our policy work on resilience

Concern is committed to building the resilience of individuals and communities so they can better prepare for the often recurrent challenges and risks they face and are able to recover when disaster strikes.

Why is this important?

The people that Concern works with are extremely poor, typically living on less than $2 a day. They live in some of the hardest to reach and most fragile places on earth, prone to conflict, drought, or floods. Every time they experience a crisis these people are pushed deeper into poverty and hunger. Even regular low-intensity ‘everyday emergencies’, such as small-scale floods, failed rains, or low-level conflict, have a major impact on poor people’s lives.

By helping communities build their resilience, we can save lives, protect livelihoods and prevent people falling deeper into poverty. Investing in resilience is also proven to be much more cost effective than repeated short term emergency response.

Mr Gerald Action - lead farmer beneficiary of the Nsanje Early Recovery and Resilience Building Project - pictured standing in front of the shallow wells that Concern has rehabilitated with bricks and cement and also treadle pumps and hoses for irrigation of his surrounding crops. Photo: Elias Antoniou / Concern Worldwide

Gerald Action pictured standing in front of the shallow wells that Concern has rehabilitated.

A group of 50 people work on rehabilitating a 4 kilometre stretch of road in Rushanga as part of a cash-for-work initiative run by Concern. Photo: Darren Vaughan

A group of 50 people work on a road in as part of a cash-for-work initiative run by Concern.

Marie Therese Barampama checks on the calliandra and leucaena saplings she recently planted, along with her 15-month old daughter Charite. Photo: Chris de Bode

Marie has taken part in Concern’s agro-forestry and community resilience programme in Burundi.

What we do

Our advocacy work is informed by our work on the ground. We promote the lessons on what works for building resilience, particularly in fragile and conflict affected contexts, to ensure that policies and funding systems work for the people most in need. We work closely with partners in civil society, for example Bond and Alliance2015, to strengthen our voice and impact. We also work in coalition with academia, NGOs and the private sector through the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance to ensure that we stay at the forefront of resilience discussions, and reach new audiences.

What we're calling for

Long-term, flexible funding

We are calling for donor institutions to provide long-term flexible funding for resilience programmes that are able to adapt when rapid humanitarian action is required. This will allow programmes to invest over the longer time-scales needed to build resilience, and to learn and adjust based on feedback from communities and evidence from different contexts.

Communities to be at the heart of decisions

More effective systems