Introduction
Investing in National Societies’ volunteers and partnerships: the road to strengthening community resilience in East Africa Imagine that the communities in which we work are on a road, and that groups within a community can agree on desirable development destinations.
There are daily challenges, recurrent hazards, and extreme disasters that act as speed bumps and detours. As a humanitarian organization, the Red Cross Red Cres- cent encourages community progress toward its destinations in both normal and extreme conditions. Development and emergency are not separate functions of this encouragement, but part of an integrated process of supporting communities to best navigate their road.
Before addressing potential roadblocks, communities need to trust that we are help- ing them by listening to their aspirations. Once credibility is achieved, we can en- courage and support their progress through enabling actions for strengthening com- munity resilience.
There are different levels of potential risk. As different groups across and within communities have different destinations and conditions, setbacks from these ob- stacles will also vary.
Owing to population, environment, development, and other factors, such as pasto- ralist to agriculturalist or rural to urban in East Africa, the roads and obstacles for different groups are changing.
As a humanitarian organization, our challenge is to engage with change by comple- menting communities’ capacities to adapt to these changes in normal times, while preparing them to withstand and bounce back better from obstacles they encounter with no regrets.
This report considers the extent to which Red Cross Red Crescent volunteer ac- tion is strengthening community resilience in East Africa. It specifically focuses on the unique role of volunteers in implementing resilience enabling actions, as set out in the joint Call for Action issued by the Inter Governmental Authority on Devel- opment (IGAD), the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) and IFRC in June 2012. It empha- sizes the roles of Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies as respected long- term partners investing in East Africa’s sustainable development.
The Red Cross Red Crescent is uniquely placed to work with governments in the development of community based programmes addressing resilience thanks to the distinctive role of National Societies as auxiliary to their governments.
The experiences of volunteers strengthening resilience at the community level pro- vide the Red Cross Red Crescent with the credibility and legitimacy to work with policy and decisions makers at local, national, regional and international levels to engage with change.