Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Latin America benefits from vast access to natural resources, however many people living in rural areas have limited access to locally produced food and rely heavily on imported goods. The fragilities in food supply chains were exacerbated by COVID-19, which left people at risk of not being able to meet their immediate food needs. Recovery and renewal provides an opportunity to support Latin Americas rural agricultural sector to renew its practices, promote community health and resilience, and contribute to achieving environmental sustainability. Consider the actions proposed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) for COVID-19 recovery and renewal:

Transform food production

• Finance and support the production of a diverse range of agricultural products. Invest in multi-crop programs together with small and medium producers
• Reduce food waste by providing access to locally produced food and resources
• Prioritise local consumption and distribution of agricultural products over exports
• Promote the adoption of healthy diets with local produce through voluntary information groups, labelling policies, eating healthy campaigns, and fiscal incentives to schools that purchase local produce

Rural development

• Provide quality education and skills-training to the rural agricultural sector
• Establish sustainable practices in the agricultural sector, that recognize the diversity of the ecosystem and the cultural and traditional practices or its habitants
• Increase the infrastructure for public services and connect with urban areas. This can help to reduce rural vulnerability and enables producers to access urban markets for their products

Sustainable agriculture

• Promote water conservation and soil maintenance practices
• Protect the ecosystem by delimiting conservation areas outside of agricultural practices
• Implement early warning systems and risk reduction programmes focused on local hazards

People with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed or not in education or training, which makes them more vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic, including increased risk of poverty. Recovery strategies to address the economic impacts of the pandemic should be disability-inclusive. Consider:

• Review/amend social protection systems to better protect people with disabilities during COVID-19:
  • Raise poverty thresholds to take disability-related additional costs into account
  • Revise the definition of disability in assessment procedures, to ensure they are functioning-based rather than impairment-based
  • Train volunteer community members to support the rapid identification of people with disabilities for social protection or other assistance: these community volunteers are sometimes called 'key informants' (KIs), are knowledgeable about the topic, the local area and the people who live there
• Ensure application procedures for social protection programmes and support services are accessible in the light of COVID-19 social distancing regimes:
  • Include disabled people's organisations when reviewing the accessibility of application processes and when disseminating information about support programmes
  • Adapt application and enrolment procedures to support the inclusion of people with disabilities
  • Provide disability training to programme staff and volunteers, e.g. disability awareness
  • Ensure programme information and application materials are available in a variety of accessible formats, e.g. Braille/videos/simplified text
  • Establish COVID-safe community-based registration services to bring services closer to people, and offer person/home-based assessment procedures for those with mobility limitations
• Ensure methods to deliver social protection services and welfare payments are accessible:
  • Allow welfare payments to be paid electronically or enable people with mobility difficulties to nominate a trusted individual to collect their
  • Ensure service points are physically accessible and within the person's local community
• Ensure employment schemes are adequate and accessible for people with disabilities during COVID-19:
  • Set up employment schemes to actively employ persons with disabilities, integrating such schemes into broader employment recovery schemes, e.g. green recovery
  • Make infrastructure accessible, e.g. buildings and workplaces
  • Introduce unemployment insurance to cover the informal sector, as people with disabilities, in particular women with disabilities, are more likely to be employed in the informal sector where there is an absence of job security, unemployment insurance and paid sick leave

The SDGs, represent the world's agreed economic, social, and environmental targets for 2030, and can act as a common scorecard to ensure there are objective standards for assessing progress. Localising the ambition of the SDGs to develop local economic development strategies can help integrate social and environmental standards within local economic agendas, reduce disparities between regions, generate local business opportunities and jobs, and aim to include all marginalized communities. Consider how the SDG framework can support inclusive and diversified economic growth:

• Integrate SDG targets into on-going budget reviews process, thereby improving resource allocation and performance evaluation
• Examine the link between ongoing public policies, the SDG targets and budget expenditures
• Analyse the official indicators related to budget-planning instruments
• Partner with the private sector to launch impact investment initiatives that address the SDGs, recovery and renewal from COVID-19 and sustainable economic renewal

The compound impacts of COVID-19 and climate change are important examples of disruptive risks that require the renewal of existing risk-management systems and practices. Disruptive risks are defined as unexpected, widespread, protracted, transboundary and novel. To address these requires 'disruptive resilience' whereby the status quo in risk management is disrupted to encourage new and innovative way to enable towns and cities to respond and recover effectively from these risks. Consider how to use new kinds of data, modes of collaboration, financial mechanisms, innovation models and decision-making approaches meet challenges of 'disruptive resilience'. Consider:

• The development community should promote the notion of 'disruptive resilience' to respond to the rise in outlier and extreme events; the shift in established hazard patterns; the increase in multiple, simultaneous crises within single
• Policymakers and authorities need to revise urban risk-management practices, and embrace new kinds of data, collaboration, finance, innovation models and decision making
• Researchers must explore the financial, political, social and behavioural factors that inhibit or enhance disruptive resilience

In Argentina, there has been a sharp rise in cybercrime directed at the elderly. Consider:

• Restructuring sections of the police force to incorporate more officers to reinforce cybercrime investigations
• Preventive and participatory approaches to reducing crime through participatory security mapping. This combines crime data, geography and local knowledge to help protect people vulnerable to this type of crime
• Recruit retired police officers to help cope with the demands of COVID-19 - this has a positive impact on officers' mental health

This lesson was contributed by an expert within the Ministry of Government and Security in Argentina during project data collection.