Building Resilience at Home: Communities at the Heart of Eswatini’s Climate Strategy

While policy shifts dominated the daytime agenda at the 2025 CIC Stakeholder Forum, the evening conversation over dinner spotlighted the people behind the infrastructure: the families, communities, and small businesses that climate resilience must ultimately protect.

“Let us not only climate‑proof buildings, but let us also climate‑proof people’s lives,”
— urged Henrik Franklin, UNDP’s Resident Representative.

That ethos guided dinner discussions that reframed climate adaptation not just as engineering reform, but as social empowerment. Key themes included:

• Community-based retrofitting of homes vulnerable to floods and heatwaves.
• Leveraging green construction for job creation and local innovation.
• Ensuring equal participation of women and youth in climate adaptation projects.
• Using standardised data to target interventions where they’re needed most.

Reinforcing these ideas, Minister Ndwandwe reminded stakeholders that:

“Disaster prevention is not a cost. It is an investment.”

A growing concern also emerged around access and equity. CIC Board Chair Sandile Makhubu highlighted the exclusion of local firms in large international infrastructure tenders, which often bypass small and medium contractors. He emphasized the need to channel climate funds toward projects with local participation, helping ensure resilience starts from the ground up.

The dinner closed with a powerful insight from Dr. Msizi Myeza of CBE:

“Standardised methodology for performance prediction is essential—so we’re not just reacting to disasters but preparing communities before they occur.”

In Eswatini’s evolving climate journey, one thing is clear: the road to resilience runs through the people. And this forum reaffirmed the country’s collective resolve to place communities at the heart of its climate-adaptive construction strategy.