Building Resilience in Guinea-Bissau Where It Matters Most: Enhancing Community and Health System Resilience

Guinea-Bissau, one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, is taking a bold step to protect its people, particularly its women, girls, and children, from the accelerating impacts of climate change. The "Enhancing Community and Health System Resilience in Guinea-Bissau" project, supported by Foundation S, is a two-year initiative focused on Biombo and Bissau—regions identified by UNICEF’s Climate Landscape Analysis for Children (CLAC) as among the most at risk of coastal flooding, extreme heat, and the compounded vulnerabilities of child poverty and underdevelopment. With a Human Development Index of just 0.483, Guinea-Bissau is already fragile. Climate change now threatens to further destabilise livelihoods and health systems, especially for those living in the country's low-lying coastal zones. An alarming 47% of Guinea-Bissau’s children live in areas at high flood risk, and over half a million children are exposed to extreme heat, with

rising dangers of malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, and heat stress.

Against this backdrop, the new project—locally known as “PA NO PUDI”—aims to deliver community-driven, gender-responsive, and child-sensitive climate and health resilience solutions that are not only impactful but scalable.

Community-Led and Gender-Responsive Solutions

At the heart of the project is a commitment to empower local women and girls, not just as beneficiaries, but as agents of change. Over 1,250 women from Biombo and Bissau will be directly engaged and trained in sustainable agriculture, water management, health promotion, and leadership. These women, in turn, will reach an estimated 6,250 people across their communities.

Recognising that women are often the backbone of household and community health, the project’s design leverages their knowledge, strengthens their leadership, and equips them to mitigate climate-related health risks.

Activities include:

1. Supporting adolescent and women's groups to lead climate adaptation initiatives.
2. Training health and community workers in identifying and responding to climate-sensitive diseases.
3. Piloting mobile health solutions and data systems for early detection and response.

This emphasis on community co-design and culturally appropriate methods ensures that interventions are locally relevant, owned, and sustainable.

Aligning with Global and National Priorities

The project is strategically aligned with the UNICEF CLAC recommendations, particularly in the areas of:

Policy integration (supporting national and subnational health and climate planning),

Capacity building (training of frontline health and community workers),

Data systems (developing simple, localised surveillance tools), and

Early warning systems (empowering communities to detect and respond to climate-health risks early).

By focusing on these pillars, the project does more than implement activities—it contributes to building a model for climate-adaptive health governance in Guinea-Bissau. With concrete results, the project can position the country to better access larger-scale climate adaptation funding mechanisms.

Reinforcing Government and Health Systems

The initiative also seeks to strengthen institutional capacities, working closely with national and local authorities to improve coordination between health, environment, and community sectors—an approach that is still rare in many settings. Through this integration, the project will:

1. Support the development of gender-sensitive policies and emergency response protocols.
2. Provide capacity-building for health system staff on climate-health linkages.
3. Ensure government engagement in policy dialogues and national planning processes.

The data-driven approach, combined with community feedback mechanisms, will allow for the documentation of best practices, with a long-term vision for scaling successful interventions across other high-risk regions in the country.

Toward Lasting Impact

With a budget of €120,000, the project focuses its investments on high-impact, scalable interventions. Nearly a third of the funding is dedicated to training and capacity building, with additional resources supporting data systems, communication and visibility, and a strong monitoring and evaluation component.

By embedding feedback loops, investing in community trust, and prioritising locally led development, the initiative is poised to create a replicable model of climate-health resilience for fragile contexts.

In summary, “PA NO PUDI” is more than a climate adaptation project. It is a community-driven movement to protect the health and rights of Guinea-Bissau’s most vulnerable, starting with its women, children, and youth. By leveraging local knowledge, integrating gender and climate justice, and aligning with national and international priorities, the project offers a blueprint for how resilience can be built where it is most urgently needed—and most powerfully led.