Resilience and ICT4D Sundeep Sahay

1. Resilience and ICT4D Sundeep Sahay

2. What do wemean by resilience? • Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities and systems to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of stress and shocks, and even transform when conditions require it. Has prompted important debates on issues of measurement of inequality, capital, and savings, role of nonmarket institutions • Risks to resilience arise from various reasons: • Political, Security, Migration, Climate, Economic and various others • These shocks magnify existing vulnerabilities • Vulnerability represents the likelihood of exposure to external shock combined with the ability to cope with its impacts.

3. Definingresilience (Lancet, April 2017) • Resilience in the health systems context: health system's capacity to recover—ie, to absorb shocks and sustain gains, often measured through health outcomes. • Environment: the amount of disturbance an ecosystem can absorb and remain stable. • Policy: resilience as the ability to absorb disturbances and thrive.4, • Resilience broadly defined by disciplines pointing to the value of a wider, inclusive framing that acknowledges complexity and change beyond shock absorption.

4. Resilience in health systems • Resilience in health systems research should accommodate myriad health systems' experiences, including: • infectious disease outbreaks • natural disasters • slow-burning challenges: chronic diseases, rising health-care costs. • Furthermore, factors beyond the health system need to be understood—resilience within communities and other systems, including financial and sociopolitical systems, which influence and underpin how health systems function.

5. Twoaspectsofvulnerability • The outside – thesourceofshocks – climate, naturaldisasters, security, migration • The inside – theobjectoftheshock and its inherent capacities – technical, institutional, social, financial, infrastructural and others • Often, thoseareinherentlyweak in theinsidealso have more externalshocks (not always), and lesser resilientcapacity, thusexponentiallyenhancingvulnerability • Coping = Withstanding + Recovery + Change = Withstanding + Adaptation (Angelica Ospina and Richard Heeks 2010)

6. Approach to buildingresilience • Building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events—both natural and manmade—and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses. • Some inititiatives: • 100Resilient cities – helps cities become resilient to the shocks and stresses of the 21st century • Global Resilience: A global partnership to help poor people in Africa and Asia to build resilient futures

7. Resilience and development • Buildingresiliencestrengthensdevelopment • Buildingresiiencecanhelp support systems ofhealth, education, agricultureetc, thusdirectlystrengtheningdevelopmentprocesses • Today, buildingresilience has become a theme for manyofthedevelopmentresources • Related to other relevant discourcessuch as sustainability, scalability, robustnessetc • Butwithsomeuniquecharacteristics

8. ICTs and resilience • ICTscan be an objectofbuildingresilience, for example: • Systems thatcanwithstandpowerfluctuations • Systems thatcanwork in different environments – for example, online and offline • Systems thatcaneasily be mastered by newgroupsofusers • Systems developed for scale – different environments • ICTscanalsohelp support thebuildingofresilient systems ofdevelopmentrelevancesuch as health, agriculture and foodsecurity

9. Digital Technologies for resilience • Scale at which technologies can enable resilient outcomes: • Community • Individual • Families • Business • Government • There can also be other units of analysis

10. Someofthedomainsof support • Livelihoods • Climate • Health • Urban environments • Agriculture • Food security • Disaster management Let us discuss some examples of resilience in these domains

11. Exampleofhealthrelatedeventsrequiringresiience • Ebola crisis in West Africa – 2 yearsago, more than 30,000 peopleaffected and 11,000 died. Fearof virus spread in Europe and US • Zika virus in South America • Someinitiativestaken by Germany to buildresilience: • Brought antimicrobial resistance and healthdisaster management intotheinternational agenda (G20 – Declaration) • Contribution to thehealthsectorof Euro 850 Million • GearedMinistry to provide rapid support to countries in times ofdiseaseoutbreaks

12. Some means of building resilience • Building preparedness – preventive action • Risk assessment and prioritization of action • Responding to recurring events • Responding to catastrophic events

13. Who are involved in building resilient technologies? • Donors and philanthropic organizations • Global • National • Community based organizations • Governmental agencies • Local governmental agencies • Entrepreneurs and social organizations • University departments

14. Some common sources of funding • Donor funds • Selffunded • Microfinance • Universityresearchcouncils • Private funding • Corporatesocialresponsibility • User fees • Crowdfunding

15. E-resilience (Ospina and Heeks) • A concept developed in the context of climate change • eResiliencecan be defined as a property of livelihood systems by which ICTs interact with a set of resiliencesubproperties, enabling the system to adapt to the effects of climate change. • eResilienceaims to facilitate the identification, integration and analysis of ICTs’ potential contribution to climate change adaptation, as part of the complex set of linkages and interactions that exist within the context of vulnerabilities faced by developing countries.

16. ICTsrole in e-resilience • Contributing to adaptive processes • Influenceonotherresilience sub-properties • Dynamic linkages withother system components • Assets • Institutions • Structures • Capabilities • Contributestowards adaptive functionings

17. Somesystemicproperties • Robustness • Scale • Redundancy • Rapidity • Flexibility • Self-organization • Learning

18. Ospina and Heeksframework