The challenge posed by urban vulnerability is immense and is being compounded by rapid unplanned urbanisation, climate change and resource pressures. While the realisation that there is a fundamental shift in the landscape of crises to cities is no longer contested, aid actors are nonetheless grappling with the complexities of adapting their approaches to the urban context. The Preparedness and Resilience to address Urban Vulnerability (PRUV) Consortium aims to inform the pressing need to reshape how humanitarian action and development aid is undertaken in urban areas to address the challenge posed by urban vulnerability. Assembled within the PRUV Consortium is an exciting mix of actors with considerable experience and expertise in urban contexts that will transcend disciplines and sectors to frame a new resilience and preparedness paradigm to respond to urban challenges. It seeks to combine existing best practice with innovative thinking and technology to challenge current state of the art thinking in order to arrive at a novel approach with affected urban populations at the centre. By combining legal, social, cultural, political and public health perspectives in a holistic manner, considerable purchase is added to the research around preparedness and resilience, which, while not new within the aid sector more generally, has not been focussed sufficiently on the urban context to date. The opportunities to carry out the research in test-bed sites in Africa, Asia and Latin America adds to the potentially broad utility and transferability of the findings globally.

The Building Resilience Through Education (BRTE) Consortium brings together partners from academia, the private sector and the NGO sector to find innovative ways to strengthen the resilience of communities affected by recurring disasters. This project has its origins in an ex-post impact evaluation of Concern Worldwide’s twenty-five year engagement in Wolaita, Ethiopia. Conducted by University College Dublin’s Centre for Humanitarian Action in collaboration with Wolaita Sodo University, the evaluation found that, despite significant improvements in communities’ capacities to both absorb the effects of recurring disasters and to adapt their livelihoods based on experience of recent disasters, they remain extremely vulnerable to their natural and environmental context. As a result there is an urgent need for a novel approach that moves beyond supporting the mere absorption of or adaptation to recurring shocks and that transforms the capacity of exposed communities. The BRTE partnership has identified the importance of education in bringing about this transformative change. It aim is to build the capacity of Wolaita’s educational institution in pursuit of the following objectives: • To build the requisite critical infrastructure to enable resilience education and research; • To establish an educational platform that will build human capital and transform livelihoods; • To develop research and innovation capacity that will radically promote social and economic well-being. The BRTE programme will serve as a model of how education can drive transformative resilience in areas subject to recurring and protracted crises.