Building Resilience through the Graduation Approach Recording

A large number of studies and reports exist on the impacts of climate change and disasters and on the efficacy of different response mechanisms of the Government, donors, and various NGOs. More recently, greater attention has been paid to the interface between urbanization, climate change, and vulnerable groups, linked with strengthening resilience in urban areas. In regard to the urban impact of emerging climate threats, an assessment of such mechanisms and related enabling factors as with the Graduation approach is particularly important because of the growing frequency of diverse forms of impacts (sudden onset storms and floods, slow-onset sea level rise, and heat).

While there have been improvements in both reducing the immediate impact and in developing better response mechanisms for both extreme weather events and slow-onset hazards due to climate change, the cost of these impacts on climate change and disasters on people’s livelihoods and relative poverty remains high with rapid onset hazards likely to increase in the future. Furthermore, climate change can also impact the natural capital on which many urban and peri-urban livelihoods are based.

The Graduation approach addresses the multi-dimension of poverty by building on to the foundation of social assistance (cash transfer) to push people out from poverty through comprehensive support through livelihood promotion that includes asset transfer, technical training for enterprise development, financial inclusion to enhance financial literacy capacity and savings behavior, social protection to link existing wrap-around services and social empowerment for life skills training, coaching and confidence building. One way of reducing the impact of climate change and disasters for the urban poor could be through sustained and targeted Graduation programs or social protection for economic inclusion that are designed in terms of their viability and relevance after climate shocks and stresses.

This session highlighted some of the lessons and specific insights in the design of pro-poor resilience-building programs relevant and how the Graduation approach is creating impact at the end of the program cycle and in the long run.