Case study taken from the Start Network Impact Report 2016.
Location: UK, Africa and Asia
Project: Age and disability capacity (ADCAP) and Linking preparedness, response and resilience (LPRR)
Background: Through these two projects, Christian Aid has broadened its policy and practice for fragile settings (vulnerable areas of instability and insecurity, often following a period of conflict), moving from a primary focus on gender to wider social inclusion and resilience. It acknowledges that marginalised groups are more vulnerable in these situations and that empowering and engaging them helps to build resilience within the community as a whole.
Impact: Christian Aid’s Gender Justice Strategy was refreshed to include a wider focus and now covers other inclusion criteria, including resilience. Christian Aid has set up a new, global inclusion working group and two new inclusion posts in Africa and Asia and is training staff to ensure that inclusion is covered in practice as well in policy. They are also trialling the ‘resilience in fragile settings’ approach beyond the LPRR project, including a programme in the Honduras and Myanmar (Burma), and included it in the recently funded Irish Aid Humanitarian Programme Plan 2017–19 in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi and South Sudan.
This focus on inclusion has fed into the updated organisation Resilience Framework launched in March 2016 and is also being integrated into Christian Aid’s commitment to the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHSA).
Implications of the impact: Christian Aid has been influenced by other DEPP projects, such as ADCAP, and has changed both its policy and practice at a global and regional level.