Building Resilience for All: The Gender and Social Dynamics of Resilience

USAID defines resilience as “the ability of people, households, communities, countries and systems to mitigate, adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth”. Resilience programs aim to support people in building and exercising their resilience capacities in response to shocks and stresses, while securing their wellbeing. Studying the relationships among capacities, disturbances and wellbeing outcomes — including which kinds of capacities build resilience, how people can be supported in accessing and developing capacities and what kinds of response strategies facilitate wellbeing outcomes for all — is critical to advance the evidence base for effective resilience programming.

It is clear, however, that preferences and needs related to capacities, response strategies and wellbeing outcomes are not homogeneous for any given population or community. There is growing acceptance that gender and social inequalities influence resilience trajectories. An emerging body of practitioner guidance emphasizes that vulnerabilities and resilience capacities differ by gender. From this, one message has become clear: without investigating how needs and capacities differ among groups of people, resilience interventions run the risk of unintentionally excluding vulnerable groups or even increasing marginalization and vulnerability. Programs that do address gender-specific constraints and opportunities may be able to reap an “equity dividend” by unlocking women’s and marginalized groups’ contributions to resilience.

While evidence to date suggests that resilience trajectories are gendered, further study is needed to understand how the process of resilience is shaped by gender and social difference. Sex-disaggregated data are important, but only if the right questions are asked. Because gender and resilience dynamics are highly context-specific, guidance is needed on how to investigate these issues in specific program settings.

This policy note recommends key areas of inquiry for assessing gender and social differences in resilience that can be used to inform, evaluate, and strengthen resilience programming. Grounded in the conceptual framework of GCAN, the note identifies and describes key gender issues related to resilience. Greater attention to heterogeneity in resilience forms the foundation for developing locally specific strategies to strengthen resilience for all.