R4- CA MEL Global Resilience Learning Event Report
A report capturing lessons learned from resilience initiatives in Ethiopia, Senegal, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu
During the past three years (2014 – 2017), thanks to a grant from the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies and in collaboration with several partners, Oxfam has implemented two major multi - country resilience-building initiatives in Africa, Central America, and the Pacific: the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative (the R4 Initiative) and the Central America–Melanesia Resilience Building Program (the CA-MEL Program).
To exchange knowledge and lessons learned from the R4 and CA-MEL resilience-building initiatives, Oxfam organized the Global Resilience Learning Event, a four-day gathering of teams from the project countries to share their experiences, achievements, and best practices in community resilience building, and to examine resilience building from various perspectives, including the basic building blocks, social change processes, gender issues, key resilience capacities (Absorptive, adaptive and transformative), policy and influencing aspects, and monitoring frameworks. The relevance and utility of Oxfam’s emerging Framework and Guidance for Resilient Development was also discussed.
The Global Resilience Learning Event, held November 15–18, 2016, in Boston, highlighted several findings shared by the two projects and the countries where they were undertaken: (1) ensuring sustainable change requires a long-term perspective or investment, (2) community ownership in the change processes is essential, (3) a systems approach is necessary to deal with the multidimensional nature of challenges faced by communities, (4) gender-sensitive programming is central to building household and community resilience, and (5) diversifying or spreading risks is key to reducing the vulnerability of communities facing threats from climate change.