About this project - Voices from the Frontline of Covid-19

This report is a synthesis of the 50 ‘Voices from the Frontline’ stories commissioned by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). The stories aim to capture the hopes, fears, everyday coping strategies and longer-term aspirations for resilience and wellbeing of people living across Asia and the Pacific, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Every story documents the experiences of community members in their own voice and in real time. The snapshots are from the period June 2020 to October 2021. Each one includes further analysis by a local interviewer, who comes from a non-governmental organisation (NGO), labour union, research institute or university.

The ‘Voices from the Frontline’ stories are published in full on both CDKN’s and ICCCAD’s websites, and the synthesis narrative on this website includes hyperlinks to the original stories.

By capturing these unique and individual stories, and by presenting their common threads in this synthesis report, CDKN and ICCCAD hope to deepen understanding among a broad range of actors about how resilience is forged and strengthened at community level.

In these pages are insights for local and national governments, NGOs, community-based organisations, federations of grassroots organisations, donors and development partners, researchers and academics. It is hoped that the lessons and recommendations that emerge from these stories of coping with Covid-19, climate change and other compounding shocks may inform responses to future shocks.

The ‘Voices from the Frontline’ project is part of a larger initiative by the Global Resilience Partnership on ‘Learning from Covid-19 to create a new normal for the resilience of the most vulnerable’.

The editors of the ‘Voices from the Frontline’ series were Shahrin Mannan and Maheen Khan of ICCCAD, with Mairi Dupar of CDKN. This report was written by Mairi Dupar and Shahrin Mannan.

The authors would like to thank Dr Saleemul Huq of ICCCAD, Dr Shehnaaz Moosa, Lucia Scodanibbio of CDKN, Nathanial Matthews and Albert Norström of GRP for their review.

Special thanks to Ian Parsons, Laura McCarroll and Andrea Melidonis for building the website and Rosie Campbell and Emma Baker for production assistance.

This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, as part of the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) Programme. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, or of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) or its Board of Governors, or of the entities managing CDKN.