Funded through the generous support of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) Resilience Evaluation, Analysis and Learning (REAL) Award, the Resilience in Action Series aims to bring the practitioner community one step close to bridging this gap between theory and practice. Here, we draw on an emerging, common set of resilience capacities - from increased access to diverse financial services to ecosystems-based disaster risk and recovery strategies - with clear overlap in the sectoral work development and humanitarian practitioners are already doing. Ultimately, we aim to answer a set of critical questions: How does resilience lens change the design of interventions in key sectors or crosscutting themes? How should we shift the design and implementation of sectoral interventions to promote resilience building within programs? While it is imperative that we continue to plan for and strategize around resilience in an integrated way, we believe examining how resilience shifts in sectors critical to practical action.

In this technical brief, we focus on programmatic shifts at the intersection of resilience, gender equity, and social inclusion, which are essential in situations like the 2004 tsunami or extreme drought conditions. Sourced from existing literature and the growing evidence base of what works, this brief provides technical specialists and implementers, who are designing a new program or reviewing existing programs, recommendations for how applying a resilience lens might require them to approach gender equity and social inclusion differently.

The brief's focus represents a slight departure from the other cases in the Resilience in Action Series in that gender equity and social inclusion are not discrete sectors, but crosscutting themes, much like resilience itself. Their crosscutting nature requires us to consider how a gender equity and social inclusion approach might augment a resilience approach overall, or vice versa. To move recommendations from the realm of theory to practice, we highlight incremental opportunities for layering the two approaches or "lenses" during the three phases of programming: assessment; design; and implementation, monitoring and learning.