The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (UN Women) in collaboration with the African Development Bank (AfDB), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) and other partners partnered to host a Regional Sharefair on Gender and Resilience with the theme of ‘Strengthening Resilience by Empowering Women’. The initiative was a dynamic sharing and learning event focusing on the role of women in building and strengthening resilience, promoting dialogue and sharing of experiences on gender-responsive resilience-related programmes, innovations, good practices and policies in Africa with the aim to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs.

The intervention also facilitated long-term collaborations between regional stakeholders with the aim to identify how to address challenges, using data and predictive methods, and mobilizing support and resources to incubate, accelerate, and scale up effective solutions. The main expected outcome was the creation of a strong regional network to amplify resilience solutions beyond the event, sustaining change in policy and practices within relevant macro-economic frameworks.

 Innovations and good practices were collected prior to the event through a Call for Innovations. Innovators across Africa were invited to show cutting edge innovations, including social innovations that best provide solutions on how women, girls and their communities can build and strengthen resilience through resilient technologies and associated innovative strategies, initiatives, interventions and methods which are scalable. Innovations, pilot experiences, promising and good practices implemented by various organizations and agencies at country and regional level were showcased in a Catalogue of Innovations and Good Practices on Gender and Resilience in Africa to highlight the potential to strengthen women’s and girls’ capacities to mitigate, adapt, recover, and learn from shocks and stresses while achieving the longer-term goal of reducing vulnerability and increase well-being of women and their communities. The initiatives documented are evidence of cutting edge examples of interventions that could be replicated elsewhere and scaled up for impact to increase the resilience of women and girls in Africa.