Gender-responsive disaster risk reduction: a multi-level approach to resilience

This brief builds on the WRD Good Practices Paper (2025) to highlight how Women’s Resilience to Disasters (WRD) programme applied a multi-level approach to gender-responsive DRR. It extracts good practices that can be adapted to different contexts, identifies entry points relevant to donors, governments, UN agencies, and women’s organisations, and provides practical lessons that can inform future resilience-building efforts.

Taken together, these measures demonstrate how gender-responsive DRR not only strengthens disaster response and recovery, but also safeguards and accelerates progress on the SDGs. By embedding women’s leadership, economic empowerment, and traditional knowledge into resilience systems, they prevent disasters from exacerbating poverty, inequality, and gender-based violence. Just as importantly, they transform gender relations, positioning women as respected leaders, economic actors, and knowledge holders at every stage of the disaster cycle.