“Resilience Starts at Home” and Reproduces Household Inequalities

For the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction last 13 October, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) chose the theme “Resilience Starts at Home.” The campaign acknowledges states’ responsibilities and the disproportionate burden of care work borne by women. What does it mean to ask households to be resilient when the work that sustains them is distributed so unequally?

Preparing food and water supplies, ensuring medication is available, planning how to evacuate with people who need support. Behind each recommendation are time, labor, and someone who must take responsibility. Treating the household as an entity that organizes itself and acts on its own can obscure the power relations that determine who plans ahead, who deals with problems, and who puts their own needs on hold.

When a policy cuts services, leaves needs unmet, or assumes that each family will work out how to provide care, it shifts costs onto households. Within those households, someone absorbs those costs by reducing their paid working hours, giving up their studies, postponing a medical appointment, or sacrificing rest. The supposed savings are paid for with caregivers’ income, health, and autonomy.

Recognizing care as a human right requires examining the conditions for receiving care, providing it, and having time to care for oneself. This entails decisions about taxation, public spending, working hours, leave entitlements, and social protection. It also requires examining who can afford to pay others to provide care and the working conditions of the women who take it on, many of whom are migrants in precarious employment. Redistribution means changing how much work falls to households, what responsibilities men take on, and how the state and businesses contribute to financing and ensuring the provision of care. Community networks need resources and rights to prevent participation from reproducing an obligation to work without pay. Disaster risk management plays a direct role in this struggle when it determines which services to maintain during a crisis, which work to budget for, and whom it assumes will be available to meet every need left unaddressed.

Reducing risk requires challenging how this work is distributed. It requires men to take on the everyday work of caring and preparing the household for emergencies. It requires public care services with adequate funding and continuity during crises, decent working conditions for those who provide care, and resources for the community networks that sustain it. Every preparedness plan should specify who will carry out the tasks, what time they will have available, and what support they will receive.

It also requires challenging the decisions that create insecurity long before an alert is issued. Access to safe housing, water, and public services is part of this struggle. Asking people facing daily precarity to prepare for disasters requires addressing the material conditions that make preparedness possible.

If resilience starts at home, reducing risk requires redistributing work, time, and power within households. The shared responsibility we advocate in legal and regulatory frameworks for disaster risk management must also be put into practice in the organization and financing of care, with responsibilities for the state, businesses, civil society organizations, and households. This requires us to examine how our own proposals assign tasks and allocate resources to each person, and how much of what we call resilience continues to depend on women’s unpaid work.

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