Bhutta – resilience

Resilience is something that you very rarely bring from outside, many societies have resilience built in because of their own experiences, their own social structures. There is a book just out on Pakistan called: “Pakistan, a hard country”. I think what the author meant by the title, it’s a World Bank person who has written this, but the author probably meant by that title is that it is a country which is very strong and resilient and he is probably correct, because despite all the challenges that we have as a nation, the average Pakistani is resilient. 

Now, resilience stems from a number of things, it stems from a lot of individual attributes that are hardly acquired, they are things that you are born with. Social networks within the communities and societies that people live in which are extremely important in our country, in our people have no shortage of social networks. We are what we are today because we live very closely together. You maybe surprise to know that indigenous philanthropy in this country is far greater than any external assistance that this country receives. 

These are reflections of social safety networks. So, what can I tell you about resilience except to say that we need to take advantage of the inherent structures that contribute to resilience in our society to use those for the very purposes that we are trying to work on supporting health, nutrition, and child development. If you tell communities what is it that this will contribute to them in the long term, they will find ways and means of supporting structures and providing, so called, to some of these poor families at risk of adverse outcomes themselves. 

So, I am generally very optimistic in terms of civic society engagement a lot of my own work in my research program is focused around community support groups, which allow women and families to come together, to through way positive deviance process have learning, self-learning from positive examples from their own communities, working with the Lady Health Workers program which is one of the back bones of the primary care program in this country supporting progress and development; and it’s early days, but whatever we are learning from our own research and impact assessment from these kind of approaches, is really very supportive of this notion that if you empower people and if you give them hope, people will generally find a way and it’s generally the right way.