Catalogue of Innovations and Good Practices on Gender and Resilience

United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (UN Women) in partnership with Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), African Development Bank (AfDB), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and other partners have  partnered to host a multi stakeholder Regional Sharefair on Gender and Resilience with the theme of ‘Strengthening Resilience by Empowering Women’. The initiative focuses on the role of women in building and strengthening resilience, promoting dialogue and sharing of experiences on gender-responsive resilience-related programmes, innovations, good practices and policies in Africa with the aim to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs.

The intervention is a sharing and learning event and provides opportunity to further explore the role of women in building and strengthening resilience and promoting dialogue and sharing of experiences on gender-responsive resilience-related programmes and policies in Africa to accelerate development and humanitarian responses and the overall achievement of the SDGs. The intervention will also facilitate a long-term collaboration amongst regional stakeholders with the aim of identifying problems, using data and predictive methods, and mobilizing support and resources to incubate, accelerate, and scale effective solutions. The proposed intervention situates women’s perspectives at the center of resilience solutions, and will hence generate novel and sustainable and transformative approach to resilience solutions, at scale, drawing on a tight and diverse team to redress this complex challenge from its many angles. The main expected outcome is the creation of a strong regional network to amplify resilience solutions beyond the event, sustaining change in policy and practice within relevant macro-economic frameworks.

The innovations and good practices were collected through a Call for Innovations. Innovators across Africa were invited through the call to show cutting edge innovations, including social innovations that best provide solutions on how women, girls and their communities can build and strengthen resilience through resilient technologies and associated innovative strategies, initiatives, interventions and methods which are scalable. The innovations showcased in the catalogue are both at pilot level, medium or advanced and have the potential to strengthen women’s and girls’ capacities to mitigate, adapt, recover, and learn from shocks and stresses while achieving the longer-term goal of reducing vulnerability and increase well-being of women and their communities.

This booklet is a collation of innovations and good practices by diverse organizations/ agencies demonstrating promising and good practices in operationalizing the gender and resilience agenda within their interventions at Country and/ or Regional level. The initiatives documented are evidence and constitute innovative and cutting edge examples of interventions/ programmes that could be replicated elsewhere and scaled up for impact to increase the resilience for women and girls in Africa. The catalogue has been compiled from submissions from a call for innovations and has also leveraged on existing innovative models documented by various UN agencies including the Food and Agriculture Organization- FAO and UN Women. The catalogue calls for a culture of innovative business and/ or programme models and initiatives that guarantee resilience for women while implementing ideas that create transformation in the resilience agenda in the lives of women and girls in Africa.