Learning Resources for Grassroots Women Driven Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)

Grassroots women's groups have initiated, mastered and transferred a series of practices that build community resilience in the face of disasters. These practices range from mapping risk, constructing safe shelters to improving long term, food security and livelihoods. The GROOTS International network has a strong commitment to supporting grassroots women's leadership in consolidating, claiming and leveraging their knowledge and experience in order to scale up effective practices as well as influence decision making processes.

The learning tools developed and used by grassroots women's organizations in partnership with NGOs and supported by UNDP Gender Team, are a means to consolidate, refine, transfer and scale up their knowledge and practices. Grassroots women's knowledge of resilience is embedded in their everyday activities and thus often invisible even to grassroots women themselves. As GROOTS invests in processes that advance grassroots women's leadership and value their practice, it has been important to support grassroots women to claim, systematize and make explicit their knowledge, so that they can leverage their knowledge and practice base to influence decision making processes. The tools developed and tested by grassroots women's organizations with the support of NGO partners has been critical in enabling grassroots women to articulate and transfer their knowledge and practices. In addition to the tools developed by member organizations, we include some tools and strategies developed by the GROOTS International network with the help of member groups to help women to identify disaster risk reduction embedded in their development efforts.

The tools have been developed in different settings, they were developed and applied at different stages in the continuum from disaster to development. They focus on different sectors - housing, livelihoods, basic services; and like the groups that have developed these, are at different stages in their evolution.

These tools are for other grassroots women's groups that are interested in learning from strategies and practices developed by grassroots women in other disaster prone communities. We share these tools with the idea that they are still work in progress; and encourage readers to contact us to learn from the experiences of groups who have applied these tools.