Resilience Through Our Eyes
Resilience Through Our Eyes is a visual storytelling initiative that highlights how urban communities, especially those living in informal settlements, experience, navigate, and respond to disaster risks and climate change. The effort is supported by the German Government through the GIZ’s Resilience Initiative Africa (RIA) project and carried out in collaboration with the Africa Union Commission and Slum Dwellers International (SDI). The initiative equipped young people with hand-on photography training and mentorship over three months. Through photography, youths are documenting transformational changes in their environments, to amplify community voices, showcase community-led solutions and contribute to broader conversations on urban resilience across Africa.
Objectives
The activity follows a structured approach that blends hands-on capacity building with continuous guidance and engagement through mentorship sessions. Following the training, participants will conduct fieldwork and document real-life stories of resilience within their communities whilst receiving mentorship over a period of 3 months. The collected photographs and narratives will then be curated for exhibitions at local, national, or continental platforms. To further extend outreach, the visual content will also be adapted into formats suitable for social media (virtual) exhibitions.
Approach
The activity follows a structured approach that blends hands-on capacity building with continuous guidance and engagement through mentorship sessions. Following the training, participants will conduct fieldwork and document real-life stories of resilience within their communities whilst receiving mentorship over a period of 3 months. The collected photographs and narratives will then be curated for exhibitions at local, national, or continental platforms. To further extend outreach, the visual content will also be adapted into formats suitable for social media (virtual) exhibitions.
Expected outcomes
- Visual narratives of how communities understand and respond to disaster risks and climate change.
- Participants gain practical skills to document resilience and advocate for community needs.
- Increased visibility for marginalized communities, with their stories reaching policymakers and the broader public.
- Strengthened evidence-based advocacy.
