Maria Moita

Maria Moita is Senior Emergency and Post-Conflict Specialist in International Organization for Migration’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific based in Bangkok, covering over 30 countries. Maria supports prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery programs in countries across the region, dealing with the impacts of disaster and conflict-induced crisis, through migration and displacement lenses.

Vicente Anzellini

Vicente Anzelini leads the global and regional analysis team at Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and coordinates the production of the Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID), regional reports, and country profiles. He previously worked for the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) as researcher and policy analyst at the Risk Knowledge Section based in Geneva. He also supported UNDRR’s Regional Office for Africa, based in Nairobi, where he conducted capacity building activities on disaster risk knowledge in over 15 countries.

Bijal Brahmbhatt

Bijal Brahmbhatt is the Director of Mahila Housing Trust in India.  Her work of over 20 years in cities has been in the areas of formal, informal, and invisible governance for housing and habitat. Her programs have helped women participate in city-level initiatives, a small step to make cities inclusive.  Bijal was a Fellow (2015) of the Womanity Foundation, Switzerland and a finalist of Schwab Foundation’s Social Entrepreneur of the year, India.

Transformation Recording

Solutions to making the urban poor more resilient need to go beyond ‘business as usual and need to consider the underlying drivers which create risk for this group. Piece-meal solutions that offer temporary respite from oncoming climate change-induced stresses and disaster risks will not create the necessary level of structural change and require constant input. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss and understand how resilience initiatives can be made transformational so that urban poor households and communities within cities become truly resilient and independent.