Sustainable Livelihoods & Economic Recovery: Practitioners’ Conclave Organized by UNDP

1. BUILDING COMMUNITY RESILIENCE: A Women’s Empowerment Perspective Suranjana GuptaHuairou Commission Sustainable Livelihoods & Economic Recovery: Practitioners’ Conclave Organized by UNDP Pondicherry, India November, 2013 Suranjana.gupta@huairou.org

2. How are women vulnerable to disasters and climate change?

3. Burden of caregiving • Loss of Incomes from informal work and home-based work • Reduced mobility • Poor access to basic services • Discriminatory property rights Insecure housing and land tenure • Violence • Exclusion from decision making processes Often, these vulnerabilities are not specific to disasters, they exist in women’s everyday lives, and are exacerbated by disasters

4. Is women’s vulnerability the result of their conditions or status? Are women intrinsically vulnerable? Should resilience building interventions focus on transforming women’s living conditions or status?

5. Vulnerability is multi-dimensionalthus strategies to counter it must also be multi-dimensional.

6. Economic Recovery and Resilience • Economic recovery focuses primarily on income. But increasingly income poverty is viewed as an inadequate measure of deprivation and well being. • Resilience is about reducing vulnerability and vulnerability is multi-dimensional. • A strong, robust, asset base cushions people from shocks. • When using the SLF lens to analyze disaster related interventions, it is clear that short term responses tend to focus on protecting and replacing people’s physical and financial assets.

7. For women living in poor communities their existing asset base is too thin to protect them from the impacts of natural hazards and climate change. Thus building a multi-dimensional, robust, asset base is critical to reducing their vulnerability What kinds of interventions are needed to empower women living in poor, disaster prone communities, to become resilient?

8. What kinds of interventions have been made to reduce women’s vulnerability to disasters and climate change? Swayam Shikshan Prayog, India Sowing the Seeds of Change Health Mutual

9. A Grassroots-Friendly Framework for Empowering Women to Advance Resilient Development Strengthen Grassroots Women's Organizing and Leadership Promote Development through Awareness & Locally-led Initiatives Influence and Change Public Policy Processes Build Constituencies and Networks

10. Key Elements of Community Resilience 603 community leaders from 7 countries

11. Reconfiguring women’s public roles • Distributing relief (through federations) • Managing community kitchens • Developing seed banks • Providing information assistance • Monitoring programs / services • Identifying beneficiaries • Training and transferring practice • Formalizing women’s status as farmers • Negotiating with local /national government

12. Further Reading • Leading Resilient Development: Grassroots Practices, Partnership and Innovations • Building Women’s Leadership and Fostering Collaborations for Community Disaster Resilience (Swayam Shikshan Prayog’s Draft Report of Project Sponsored by the World Bank, GFDRR South-South Program) • What Communities Want: Putting Community Resilience Priorities on the Agenda for 2015 • Face to Face with Women in Aceh

13. Questions & Comments?