

Dagrous Msiska VSO, Malawi

Mine is just a general comment. It is important to acknowledge that coping, resilience and adaptation mechanisms (in that order) to environmental and socio-economic shocks and disasters that increase people's vulnerability to negative impacts of such shocks is not a once off thing - it is not a project. This is even more complicated in protracted crisis situations. As such, the issue is not about scale of programming but rather sustainability of such programming to continuously build people's capacity to adapt to seemingly changing crises.  The starting point is the people themselves. Programming should enable people to holistically explore these traditional coping systems and enabling them to build on these systems to make them more resilient and subsequently adapt to subsequent shocks.