AREAS OF INTERVENTION
With 25 years of experience in humanitarian work, RET’s interventions have expanded beyond education.
Our projects often touch multiple sectors – from humanitarian ones like protection of young families, widowed mothers, young children and youth to development that includes economic growth and development initiatives and disaster risk reduction and management, to name a few.
Multi-sectoral solutions are critical for addressing the challenges faced by vulnerable young people, their families, their widowed young mothers, and the communities where they live.
Click below to learn more about our commitment to multi-sectoral solutions.
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Democracy and governance
Strong democracies are foundational for ensuring government accountability, and likewise, good governance is key to creating communities, regions, and countries where human rights are respected.
Disaster risk reduction and management
This area of intervention focuses on reducing the vulnerabilities of communities against the impacts of increasingly volatile disasters like hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes, among others, by promoting comprehensive disaster risk management (CDRM) through the identification and mitigation of threats, strengthening preparedness and response, and increasing post-disaster resilience.
RET collaborates directly with communities, public institutions, local organizations and multi-level actors to implement nature-based solutions, sustainably manage resources and promote adaptive territorial planning. These actions seek to minimize the impact of phenomena such as floods, droughts, hurricanes and other extreme events. Additionally, the organization ensures the protection and assistance of people displaced or at risk of displacement, prioritizing the prevention of damage and loss, while promoting sustainable recovery and restoration of livelihoods in the affected territories.
Economic growth and development
Economic growth is a phenomenon of market productivity and a rising GDP and is an important requirement for the sustainable development of a country.
Livelihoods are the capabilities, assets, knowledge, and activities required for generating income and securing a means of living in safety and with dignity.
Sustainable livelihoods refer to the capacity of people to generate and maintain a means of living that supports their well-being as well as that of future generations.
Education and capacity building
Our core competencies in the education sector are built on interventions ranging from the strengthening of formal and non-formal education to basic literacy and numeracy, tertiary education, psychosocial support, and the rights of all to access education. In stable contexts, formal education is usually the central pillar of knowledge.
However, in emergencies, the formal education system is often dysfunctional or completely nonexistent, creating a wide range of approaches to respond to the specific and acute needs of young people. This is what we initially referred to when saying “bridging the gaps,” though as our work scope has expanded, so has this idea.
Health and WASH
Clean and accessible drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are key to human health and well-being. People with safe water, sanitation, and hygiene are more resilient, living in healthy environments and dignified communities.
Safe WASH not only affects health outcomes but also facilitates better attendance rates in schools and promotes and enables livelihoods.
Infrastructure and equipment
From irrigation for independent farms and communities to access roads that facilitate easier travel to schools, markets, and health facilities, RET’s infrastructure and basic equipment programs seek to empower communities by bridging the gaps in their physical needs. In turn, this helps them become more independent, self-sufficient, and resilient to future challenges.
Nutrition and food security
Food security is a measure of the availability of food and the ability to access it. It exists when all people – at all times – have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a safe, active, healthy life.
During a humanitarian crisis, when there is a risk or an actual rise in mortality due to acute malnutrition, nutrition and food security interventions seek to improve the nutritional well-being of populations of concern by tackling the immediate and underlying causes of malnutrition and ensuring an adequate supply of food to meet nutritional and cultural needs of the affected population during the crisis.
Peace, stability, and transition
RET’s actions using the Humanitarian, Development, Peace (HDP) triple nexus approach are complemented with a Peace dimension. The addition of the peace dimension in the nexus acknowledges the vital importance of conflict sensitivity and the role young people can play in consolidating peace, ensuring communities co-exist and diversity is respected.
Protection
Protection aims to ensure the full and equal respect for the rights of all individuals without discrimination and in accordance with the letter and the spirit of the relevant bodies of law.
Protection requires working with all relevant stakeholders – from vulnerable populations and communities to the authorities – to safeguard rights by seeking to prevent and end patterns of violence and abuse; address the trauma and related effects of violence or abuse; identify and promote sustainable solutions; and foster respect in accordance with the law.
Youth empowerment
Empowerment is as a way people gain control over their lives through active participation, with an emphasis on strengths instead of weaknesses, an acknowledgment of cultural diversity, and the use of language that reflects the empowerment ideals.
By encouraging people to be active participants, we seek to enable them to become catalysts of change in their communities.
In our youth empowerment programs, we help children and young people to understand they can take charge of their lives and contribute, at their level, to the development of the community.
MULTI-SECTORAL APPROACH
Quality education can’t happen if children are hungry or unable to attend school because they’re ill. Likewise, economic growth and development are near-impossible if individuals and communities are poorly governed, lack basic infrastructure and equipment, or live under the threat of violence.
These represent just a handful of the interlinked situations in which RET works on a daily basis. Our multi-sectoral approach provides a comprehensive plan for addressing these multi-dimensional needs. By implementing projects that include facets of more than one area of intervention, we’re able to achieve more significant and long-lasting results.
At all levels, we strive to act within international and national legal and operational frameworks and standards, fostering leadership, innovative thinking, and resources, and creating a better strategy in response to development gaps.