Seven ways communities are coming together to make homes more resilient for everyone
Nobody knows a home's risks better than the people who live in it.
Where the water rises first, which roof overheats, how long the road to safety takes: households hold this knowledge long before any survey is conducted. Yet the pillars of households – women, young people, older adults, people with disabilities and families in informal settlements – are too often missing when decisions about housing are made.
This is why resilience needs to start at home – and why the people at home must have a say in how resilience is built.
The examples below show how resilience grows when communities help to plan, build and check the work, and when the people most often left out are brought in early.
1. A household savings scheme that helped move neighbourhoods to safer ground
Flooding is a regular event in Iloilo City, in the Philippines: Typhoon Fengshen submerged about 80% of the city in 2008. The Iloilo chapter of the Homeless People's Federation of the Philippines worked with the city government so that families in flood-prone informal settlements could move to secure brick homes on land bought within the city, close to jobs, schools and health services.
Community members helped design and build the homes, and community savings and low-interest loans paid for them. More than 1,250 households resettled, and the programme grew alongside more than 560 collective savings groups with over 4,500 members. Representatives of the urban poor were appointed to city boards on resettlement and disaster risk.
2. Secure land rights make safer homes worth building
In Harare, Zimbabwe, more than a third of residents live in informal settlements exposed to drought, flooding and temperature extremes. A study of three of these settlements, reported by the International Institute for Environment and Development, compared what residents do when their land rights are secure, partly secure, or under threat.
In Dzivarasekwa Extension, where tenure is secure, residents and the city government co-produced upgrades including better insulation and ventilation in homes and stormwater systems, and residents pooled savings to pay for power connections. In Tafara, where title is still pending, residents improved water access and sanitation, building waterless composting EcoSan toilets, drilling boreholes and adopting other nature-based solutions. In Crowborough North, where the threat of eviction discourages investment, responses stayed reactive and individual, limiting community resilience initiatives. The study found that housing tenure security is a major factor in whether households invest and act together.
3. Making rebuilt resilient homes accessible to everyone
Reconstruction after Nepal's 2015 earthquake and Pakistan's 2022 floods offers lessons on including people with disabilities. In Nepal, masons were taught about disability and accessible design, the barriers people face were added to the training manual, and accessibility features were retrofitted to many houses already rebuilt – although steep terrain made accessible ramps impractical for some homes.
In Pakistan's Sindh province, disability data was collected from the first damage assessment, identifying more than 100,000 people with disabilities, and project teams regularly consulted disabled persons' organisations. In Haroon Sheikh settlement, about 84 square metres of tactile paving connects the homes of families with visually impaired children to water and sanitation.
4. School students carrying weather warnings home
In the informal settlements of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the Daraja project set out to give residents forecasts they could act on. Local organisations and leaders helped design the service from the start, creating a feedback loop between communities and forecasters. Between April 2018 and September 2020 it reached more than a million people, and a survey of 700 households found that residents took better preventive action ahead of severe weather, with avoided losses and improved livelihoods as a result.
Teachers and pupils helped carry the warnings home. Jane Brown, a teacher at Keko Mwanga Primary School in Dar es Salaam, was part of a mobile-phone chat group set up by the project and shared updates with her pupils during the April–May 2019 rains. "Students informed their parents, especially those who live at the valley," she said, and parents used the information to protect their belongings, including schoolbooks that previous floods had often destroyed. A community leader in Kibera recalls that he once dismissed weather bulletins as "false information" and now sees their value for household resilience.
5. Cooler tin houses, designed with residents
Existing tin houses in Sattola settlement, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, are the starting point for COOL SURFACES, one of three winning designs in a heat-adaptive architecture competition run by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre with the IFRC Global Disaster Preparedness Center, and open to architecture and urban design students worldwide. The design upgrades the houses with three passive measures – a cool floor, a cool wall and a cool roof – built from low-cost local materials that residents can install themselves.
It drew on community surveys about thermal comfort, how space is used and which materials people prefer. Ten designs advanced to a second round, each paired with a mentor between November 2025 and February 2026.
6. Women masons rebuilding Nepal's homes, brick by brick
After the 2015 earthquake, Nepal's National Reconstruction Authority hired 149 women as mobile masons across 14 of the worst-affected districts, under a World Bank-supported housing reconstruction project. They make up 20% of the mobile masons recruited.
Their work goes beyond laying stone: they give technical advice, link communities to the programme, inspect houses and help vulnerable households raise grievances.
"Mason training transformed my life," said Kamala B.K., 38. Ganga Bhujel, 21, from Okhaldhunga, says homeowners encouraged her to keep going. In Rasuwa, Durga Bhatta says villagers now view the mobile masons as de facto engineers because they empower local communities with resilient construction.
7. In Chile and Argentina, residents upgrade their own homes and neighbourhoods
In El Esfuerzo in Valparaíso, Chile, and Nuevo Alberdi in Rosario, Argentina, residents of informal settlements are adapting to recurrent floods, wildfires and landslides. A 2026 study by the IFRC Global Disaster Preparedness Center documents incremental upgrades to homes that reduce exposure to hazards, neighbourhood works, and emergency practices that rely on mutual aid, local knowledge and communication networks.
The study, based on 28 key informant interviews, four focus groups and participatory mapping, finds that the scale, durability and equity of these efforts depend on secure tenure, integrated basic services and shared decision-making between residents and institutions.
These examples show that resilient housing is shaped by who takes part. In each case, the people closest to the risk – residents, savings groups, teachers and pupils, women masons, families living with disability – helped to shape how the response worked.
Including the whole community from the start ensures that what gets built meets households’ needs.
In 2026, International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction – observed on 13 October – focuses on how homes and households can build resilience and reduce disaster risk… because resilience starts at home.