Urban Resilience Technical Guidance

USAID can improve development outcomes by strengthening urban resilience. Through this approach USAID can guard against risks and help capture and safeguard the benefits of urbanization, especially for the most vulnerable. Concepts from this technical guidance can be applied to focused sector programming as well as integrated programming across sectors.

USAID defines resilience as the ability of people, households, communities, cities, countries, and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth. The USAID Urban Resilience Technical Guidance aims to help staff better understand urban resilience and provides evidence-based, practical guidance on how it can be applied to Agency programming, including recommendations and examples for taking an “urban resilience lens” to program design in the Governance, Health, and Power sectors.

To support this work, this technical guidance provides:

• The case for urban resilience and a summary of the global evidence base;
• An overview of approaches USAID can use to advance urban resilience, including a set of building blocks to support integrating urban resilience in programming;
• Key questions to inform the design of interventions, including assessing risks and assets, and identifying opportunities for integration with related programming;
• Urban Resilience Sector Guides for governance, health, and power that offer recommendations to help staff apply an “urban resilience lens” to program design in these sectors.