Reverie Zurbas/USAID
A man in Senegal demonstrates the use
of a handcrank water pump.
42 Essay 7
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Bread for the World Institute
those who are able to work do so. The work contributes to the community’s
future food security—for example, improving a road used to reach a market
town or clearing a pond that can then be stocked with fish.
Communities should also seek to use their human resources as effectively
as possible. Young adults often have new ideas and the energy and enthusiasm to try different ways of doing things. Women are another group
with unique strengths: “Despite the fact that women … often bear
the heaviest burden of shock and stresses,” USAID notes, “they also
possess enormous individual and collective capacity to help themselves, their families, and their communities.” A recent study in Sudan found that women were more likely than men to effectively use
available local resources in diversification strategies.
The thinking behind “resilience” programs is simply that poor
communities can better fight hunger and malnutrition by identifying
potential threats to their main ways of earning a living and developing
workable alternatives—before they are desperately needed.
David Gressly, U.N. Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the
Sahel, lists some actions that, along with safety net programs, help
communities build resilience: reducing chronic child malnutrition,
improving irrigation and drainage systems, diversifying food sources,
finding better ways to preserve food stocks, and constructing dams to
store water that will later irrigate crops.
For four Sahel farmers in Burkina Faso, West Africa, the key to
resilience was a viable alternative to rain-fed crops. In early 2012,
drought destroyed most of their maize crop. But thanks to an earli