ISLAMABAD, 22 December (IRIN) - Pakistan's earthquake of October 2005, the worst natural disaster in the country's history, served as a window of opportunity for empowering Pakistani women and enabling them to take an active role in building disaster-resilient communities, noted this year's World Disasters Report of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

IFRC's annual account has devoted a whole chapter on gender impacts of disasters, with a particular focus on the women of northern Pakistan who survived the earthquake but struggled to access their fair share of aid.

The International Federation has urged the aid organisations to incorporate more gender-aligned disaster response strategies globally when dealing in emergency situations to ensure the rights of women to be equal partners.

Gender-aware NGOs and civil society groups have improved women's engagement in relief and recovery, but these efforts remain largely isolated and insufficient.

"Field work in Pakistan suggested gender awareness was much more likely within NGOs, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and UN agencies as opposed to Pakistani government organisations," commented the IFRC report, released last Thursday.

More than 75,000 people were killed and 3.5 million people left homeless after the quake ripped through parts of northern Pakistan, inflicting extensive damage on public and private infrastructure across an area of 30,000 sq km.

"The earthquake was the worst kind of catastrophe, but it brought out women and girls. [Now] There are opportunities, specially in [traditionally very conservative] North West Frontier Province (NWFP)," said Fareeha Ummar of the Aga Khan Rural Support Project.

An IFRC assessment found that none of the Pakistani women interviewed in a rapid assessment had undertaken paid work before the earthquake.

However, afterwards several international aid agencies took initiatives to encourage female employment when a large number of households lost their male family heads.

In a tent village of quake-hit Balakot town in NWFP, the International Labour Organization (ILO) employed women to be responsible for cleanliness and also initiated a quilt-making enterprise.

"God caused the earthquake and it has brought a lot of destruction, but it has shaken the roots of society and has brought change into women's lives and has given us a voice," a woman from Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, told Sumeera Mehboob Qureshi, chair of a female committee for quake-displaced camps set up by the office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) earlier this year in February.

While mentioning gender inequality, the IFRC report also noted the fact that in disasters men's psychological health is often neglected and their psychological needs left untreated because of cultural norms.

"The stereotypical expectations of men to 'be strong' means that their specific health needs during disaster have not been widely recognised. Humanitarian workers can overestimate men's emotional strength; men and boys may need gender-sensitive support to deal with trauma, loss and the challenge of recovery," the annual report said.

Some men widowed by the earthquake in Pakistan said they wanted to remarry soon to ensure that they had a mother figure for their young children.

One major area of concern cutting across many disasters is the poor management of women's and girl's personal hygiene needs, the IFRC's annual account said in its chapter entitled, 'Please don't raise gender now – we're in an emergency!"

A female government official from Sri Lanka, who was part of the district team responsible for tsunami disaster relief, admitted that even as a woman, it took her several days to ensure sanitary supplies were included in emergency distributions.

While Pakistani quake-affected women didn't know how to use Western sanitary items, poorer women often used washable rags rather than sanitary items.

"In most cultures, menstruation is an extremely private female issue. This posed difficulties for women queuing up publicly to obtain sanitary items from mainly male relief teams," noted the IFRC report.

"In the male-dominated world of disasters management, it takes experience and gender training to consider such issues from the start," it commented.

"When gender is neglected in disaster response and risk reduction, impact, needs and priorities are also overlooked; poverty and inequality are exacerbated; vulnerability is intensified and new categories of victims are created," John Tulloch, an IFRC spokesman, said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Although a number of humanitarian organisations have initiated gender-related data collection, it remains largely ad hoc, which is a barrier to gender-sensitive disaster project planning and evaluation.

"It is time to end the neglect of gender in disasters and ensure the rights of women [and men] to be equal partners throughout all aspects of disaster risk reduction and response," the report concluded.