One-in-three dollars spent on development is lost to disaster, according to the World Bank, and over the last 30 years that has added up to a total of $3.8 trillion.
A new Global Resilience Partnership, with an initial investment of $100 million by The Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), aims to support millions of people in building stronger and more resilient futures. It will focus on the Sahel, Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia where typhoons, floods, earthquakes and drought destroy lives and jobs and hamper development.
The two organizations say $100 million is just an initial investment and they are talking to groups from both private and development sectors who may put in more funds or provide technical support.
Work by the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID has decisively shown that building resilience reduces the likelihood that severe disruption becomes disaster, enabling communities and institutions to rebound faster and more effectively.
Recognizing that solving the complex challenges of the 21st century requires working in partnership with regional and local stakeholders, the Resilience Partnership will help drive a shared global resilience agenda, where humanitarian and development planning is better aligned.
Through a network of regional hubs the Resilience Partnership will source, test and scale innovative solutions that are tailored to local needs, in part by:
- Identifying critical capacity gaps
- Advancing data-driven analytics and measurements
- Designing flexible financial mechanisms like micro-finance and risk insurance
- Catalyzing alliances across all sectors
- Enabling regional and global learning
In February this year, USAID also announced its RISE (Resilience in the Sahel-Enhanced) Initiative. RISE commits more than $130 million over the first two years of a five-year effort to build resilience to recurrent crisis in West Africa’s Sahel. In this region, some 18.7 million people faced food insecurity in 2012 due to severe drought for the third time in a decade.
Drought photo by Pablo Tosco/Oxfam
Flood photo by EC/ECHO/Nicolas Le Guen