WUNRN
WOMEN ARE KEY TO DISASTER RISK
REDUCTION & RECOVERY
________________________________________________________
GROOTS INTERNATIONAL -
Huairou Commission
Disaster Resilience - Grassroots Women
GROOTS leads the Resilience Campaign for the Huairou Commission. Grassroots women are regularly responding to disasters, playing key roles in rebuilding after disasters and preparing communities to be more resilient to disasters and climate change. However, women are consistently left out of planning and monitoring resources coming in to their community after a disaster. GROOTS member organizations are working with the Resilience Campaign to strengthen the strategies of grassroots women to reduce community vulnerability. GROOTS established the Community Disaster Relief Fund (CDRF) to channel funds directly to community based organizations and women's groups. Currently, a Community Platform is being created in partnership with UNISDR as a space for grassroots women to act as advisor and evaluators of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) that seeks to build more resilient communities. CDRF and the Community Platform are main initiatives of the Resilience Campaign for the Huairou Commission. For more information on grassroots women's approaches to disaster resilience, see our Community Resilience Campaign page.
_____________________________________________________________
PUTTING WOMEN ON THE DISASTER RISK
REDUCTION AGENDA
Women need to be more actively involved in
disaster risk management.
Photo: Anna Wallenlind
Nuvunga/IRIN
GENEVA, 6 June 2013 (IRIN) - Every year, approximately 200
million people around the world are affected by disasters. Of these, 100
million are women or girls, according to the UN’s Office for Disaster Risk
Reduction (UNISDR).
Yet while the UN General Assembly endorsed in 2005 the Hyogo Framework
of Action (HFA) - a 10-year plan to make the world safer from natural
hazards, which calls for gender perspectives to be integrated into disaster
programmes - most countries currently still lack such gender-sensitive policies.
The latest reports on the HFA’s progress showed that, in the period from 2009
to 2011, 62 out of 70 countries consulted did not collect gender-disaggregated
information on disaster vulnerability and capacity.
“It is fairly obvious that nations and communities that only draw on the
strength of resilience and solutions of half their populations are doomed to
failure. What we need to be looking at is how every citizen of a nation has the
full opportunity to contribute to… resilience and to measures for disaster risk
reduction,” said Kathleen Cravero-Kristoffersson, president of the Oak
Foundation, at the opening of Women Making a Difference, an event at the
fourth Global Platform for Disaster Reduction, held in Geneva from
19-23 May.
The platform was held to evaluate progress and challenges in implementing the
HFA, and to make preparations for the post-2015 development agenda.
Participants at the event also looked at how the follow-up plan to the HFA -
the HFA2 - could be sensitive to women and gender.
Cravero-Kristoffersson reminded the audience that the theme of last year’s 13
October International Disaster Risk Reduction Day was “Women, the Invisible
Force of Resilience.” “But in the world today, and by this event, we can see
that women are not invisible, we choose not to see them,” she said.
Panellist Fatimetou Malick, mayor of Tevrah Zeina, in Mauritania, agreed. “It
is crucial to dissociate women from the idea of vulnerable and to see women as
determinant actors in disaster risk reduction,” she said. She is the only
female mayor in the African country, which has suffered repeated droughts in
recent years.
Grassroots
The HFA mid-term review background study revealed that grassroots women’s
organizations are almost always excluded or disconnected from national disaster
risk reduction (DRR) and recovery programmes, despite their successful track
records in reducing everyday risks for families.
Cravero-Kristoffersson highlighted that one of the most important priorities in
the HFA2 would be to reverse top-down resilience programming, investing in
grassroots, women-lead initiatives as the foundation of local implementation of
the HFA2.
“We need to formalize grassroots women’s roles in planning, operationalizing
and monitoring development programmes around disaster and climate change, and
to create policies and programme incentives that encourage local and national
governments to collaborate effectively with grassroots women’s organizations,”
said Violet Shivutse, a panellist at the event and activist of GROOTS, a
grassroots women’s organization in the Kakamega region of northwestern Kenya.
Following persistent droughts and floods in the area, GROOTS conducted a mapping
exercise to assess households’ vulnerabilities, organized collective farming
groups, and piloted drought resistant crops.
“From 2003 to 2005, we started seeing a big shift in climate pattern. This is
an area where we know that the timing of our planting was March, but then we
could have droughts going up to June or July, or we could see rainfall in the
beginning of January, before we prepared our land. So it was a real shift.
Crops were destroyed by droughts or by floods,” explained Shivutse.
They then established demonstration plots as learning centres for the
community, started water harvesting rainwater to use during droughts, and
organized dialogues with local government institutions to share practices and
challenges.
Equality on the difference
How to empower women and guarantee their rights in the context of DRR was also
discussed.
Bangladesh ensures some 30 percent of the beneficiaries in its DRR projects are
women, and Cambodia is studying implementing quotas for women on its DRR programmes.
Meanwhile, Palestinians are looking beyond simple gender equality, said a
panellist from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
“I don't like the expression that we need to be equal to men. We are completing
each other: I’m the mother, the sister, and he is the father, the brother. So
we should work together in order to bring to our world more resilience and
peace,” argued Ekhlas Ratrout Aqel, mayor of the West Bank city of Nablus.
“There [are] so many invasion[s] and destruction in Palestine; we have
experience on this. In 2002, there was an invasion in most of the cities in
Palestine, and we put our hand[s] together - doctors, engineers, men and women,
all together.”
According to UNISDR’s guidelines Making Disaster Risk Reduction Gender-Sensitive, a growing
number of countries are involving women actively in disaster risk management
and planning, and are integrating gender dimensions into risk reduction and
response plans. And thanks to the global efforts to implement the HFA, gender
and diversity checklists are becoming standard in disaster preparations around
the world.