Islamic Relief Worldwide

We have our IRW Global Strategy and Global Reslience Strategy to guide our staff across the organisation about Islamic Relief’s core priorities, approaches and strategies to tackle the increasing risk of disasters that has already threatened the poor and marginalised communities we work with. These communities living in urban or rural areas; or in an area with on-going conflict, are also vulnerable to climate change impacts. Thus the strategies outlined in the documents are reinforced by climate change consideration and adopted the broad resilience building concept.

In our view, DRR focuses on comprehensive action to minimise the likely damage caused by disasters, the concept of resilience is broader, which not only addresses current level of disaster risk but also likely scale of risk caused by climate change. Resilience is an opposite concept of vulnerability that explains why some group of people are more affected by disasters than others. We use the term ‘resilience building’ to reinforce that while we plan and implement DRR activities we consider climate change in a way that support communities to have necessary capacity and resources to deal with increasing frequency and intensity of disaster that climate change causes.

These strategies are updated in our collective lessons shared by our staff in a Global Resilience Learning Exchange Workshop held in Dhaka, Bangladesh in December 2012. The workshop’s participants recalled that IRW has already developed an array of risk reduction approaches for flood, cyclone, drought, earthquake and conflict—and these approaches, together with our regular development work i.e. micro finance, WASH, livelihoods and education we can support the vulnerable people to be resilient to disasters and climate change.

Disasters have implication to all our works—and poses a serious threat to all communities we work with: drought prone East Africa, cyclone and flood prone Asia and earthquake prone cities and towns. The workshop, thus, reminded us that resilience building is our global priority—and we must ensure that results of our work is resilient to disasters and at the same time our works should enhance people’s ability to be resilient.

Global: GNDR
Regional: CANSA, ADRRN,
National: NARRI, ARCAB, RPI

Syed Shahnawaz Ali
Global Resilience Lead
[email protected]
[email protected]

http://www.islamicrelief.com/