Resilience, integrated development and family planning: building long-term solutions.

For the many individuals and communities experiencing natural disasters and environmental degradation, building resilience means becoming more proficient at anticipating, preventing, recovering, and rebuilding following negative shocks and stresses. Development practitioners have been working to build this proficiency in vulnerable communities around the world for several decades. This article first examines the meaning of resilience as a component of responding to disasters and some of the key components of building resilience. It then summarises approaches to resilience developed by the Rockefeller and Packard Foundations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, USAID and DFID, which show how family planning services can contribute to resilience. Next, it gives some examples of how family planning has been integrated into some current environment and development programmes. Finally, it describes how these integrated programmes have succeeded in helping communities to diversify livelihoods, bolster community engagement and resilience, build new governance structures, and position women as agents of change.