Seeking transformative solutions to resilience challenges in Asia

SEI’s Asia Centre is partnering the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) for the Global Resilience Challenge to fund the most transformative solutions with up to 1 million USD for implementation and continued innovation. GRP selected 17 teams from among nearly 500 applicants across six continents.

The Global Resilience Partnership aims to help millions of vulnerable people in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia better adapt to shocks and chronic stresses and invest in a more resilient future. With an initial commitment of 150 million USD, this new Resilience Partnership will help the global community pivot from being reactive in the wake of disaster to driving evidence-based investments that enable cities, communities and households to better manage and adapt to inevitable shocks.

SEI Asia Centre staff will be partnering in three GRP teams:

1. Addressing resilience challenges through participatory LUP and village adaptation plans in the Ramsar sites of the Mekong Basin (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam), led by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with Agus Nugroho and Rajesh Daniel. This project aims to address the disconnect between policy and best practices, the project’€™s overarching objective is to enhance resilience in the 11 Mekong Ramsar sites in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Lao PDR through the development and implementation of multi-disciplinary and collaborative local planning including land use planning and adaptation plans.

2. €œPrivate sector action to build resilient supply chain communities, led by Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), with Frank Thomalla and Nguyen Ha. This project will examine how to improve the resilience to environmental hazards of supply chain factories and their surrounding urban communities. Supply chain factories are often the central source of livelihoods in vulnerable urban and peri-urban communities and a key economic engine for lifting the extreme poor out of poverty.

3. Disability and disasters: Empowering people and building resilience to risk€ led by University of Sydney with Karlee Johnson. This project aims to identify how to best integrate the needs of this sizeable and particularly vulnerable population into disaster risk reduction strategies and resilience-building programs, this team will seek a better understanding of critical capacity gaps for people with disabilities and best practices for properly communicating and overcoming the barriers they face.

The Global Resilience Challenge is a three-stage grant competition led by the Global Resilience Partnership, a 150 million USD effort of the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to help the global community pivot from being reactive in the wake of disasters to driving evidence-based investments to better manage and adapt to inevitable shocks.

The Global Resilience Challenge asked teams to submit their “vision and plan for taking a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach to solving the greatest resilience challenges across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and South and Southeast Asia”.

The key feature of the GRP is “a multi-phase resilience design challenge, focused on bringing together people and organizations from across sectors to collaborate on bold and innovative solutions to the toughest resilience challenges in the three focus regions: the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and South and Southeast Asia. Multi-sectoral teams will collectively research and diagnose problems, and develop locally driven, high-impact solutions that can build resilience at scale”€.

The selected resilience topics, team leaders, and lead organizations, designated by focus region are available in the GRC website. For more details, please see selected teams at the GRP website.