The Role of Grassroots Women in Building Urban Resilience

The rising costs of disasters has a human face – all too often it is the face of the poorest and most marginalized communities who have been excluded from the development decisions that affect their exposure to a wide range threats. Building urban resilience has a human face as well. This session will explore the role that organized groups of grassroots women are playing in enhancing the resilience of livelihoods and cities and supporting achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

National governments in declaring their commitment to meet sustainable development goals, address climate change and reduce disaster risk, have advanced an agenda for resilience that relies on local action and calls for the engagement of women and community based-organizations. To realize these goals, inclusive engagement and financing of grassroots women and other community actors must move from a political ambition to common practice.

As members of the Huairou Commission, grassroots women’s-led organizations from around the world, have anchored a growing movement for building resilience from the bottom-up. Reflecting on their years of experience in delivering local solutions to sustainable livelihoods and supporting post-disaster response and recovery, these leaders have developed an operational vision for resilience that emphasizes a community’s capacity to organize itself to reduce the impacts of natural hazards and climate change by protecting resources such as lives, livelihoods, assets and infrastructure. It includes a community’s capacities to advance development processes, social networks and institutional partnerships that strengthen its ability to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from disaster.

This session will examine concrete examples of how grassroots women in urban and peri-urban cities in the Philippines, Mexico, Uganda and Kenya are taking leadership in the recovery of their natural disaster and climate impacted communities and working with decentralized units of government to formalize their roles in public decision making and development programming. strengthening grassroots women’s organizing and grassroots leaders, promoting resilient development through raising awareness of locally-led initiatives to improve housing, infrastructure, basic services, livelihoods; and contributing the expertise and priorities of grassroots women in national and local policy and planning contexts. The session will also look specifically at how grassroots women have been building networks and coalitions that support joint planning, implementation, and evaluation of urban planning and development.

Particular attention will be given to introducing outcomes of the inaugural Global Grassroots Women's Congress convened in Kuala Lumpur in the days immediately preceding WUF9 where grassroots leaders, representing a global movement, convened to affirm their shared commitment, chart strategic directions in areas such as safe cities and urban resilience. In preparing for the Congress, grassroots women’s led organizations in over a dozen countries convened a national pilots where practical issues around local planning, delivering and monitoring the implementation of global agreements focused on resilience: the New Urban Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. These national dialogues have shaped the priorities and strategic directions in urban development and resilience more broadly that are expected to be adopted at the inaugural Global Grassroots Women’s Congress.