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Direct Link to Full 2014 Report: South Asia Womens Resilience Index - Examining the Role of Women in Preparing for and Recovering from Disasters
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Pakistan's Women
Worst Prepared in South Asia Region for Natural Disasters
Flood victims sit beside their
belongings as they wait for help, along a road in Multan, Punjab Province,
Pakistan
Photo: September 13, 2014
Reuters/Zohra Bensemra
By Alisa Tang
BANGKOK, Nov 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) -
Women in Pakistan - the South Asian country with the highest death toll from
natural disasters over the past two decades - are the region's least resilient
when it comes to preparing for and recovering after these crises, an ActionAid
report said.
Pakistan lagged behind other seven other
countries measured, reflecting women's lower socio-economic status in that
country, ActionAid said in its report The non-governmental organisation, in
partnership with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade,
commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit to create an index on a scale of 1
to 100 to measure women's resilience across seven South Asian countries, with
Japan as a developed-country benchmark.
The index examined four categories - economic,
infrastructure, institutional and social - to assess the capacity of each
country's women to adapt to and recover from sudden, unanticipated events.
It found that Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India,
the Maldives and Bangladesh - scoring from 40 to 46.4 - are half as resilient
as Japan, which scored 80.6. Pakistan ranks last, scoring 27.8.
"Across the region, women's resilience
isn't being considered in national planning to ensure women can plan for and
recover from natural disasters," Melissa Bungcaras, resilience and
disaster risk reduction adviser to ActionAid Australia, said by phone from
Kathmandu.
The report was launched in Nepal's capital at
the People's South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (People's SAARC)
summit, a meeting of NGOs and civil society groups.
Of the countries included in the report,
Pakistan and India lost the most lives in disasters between 1995 and 2014, with
174,187 and 99,357 deaths respectively.
Pakistan is highly vulnerable to earthquakes
and floods, and suffered $26 billion in damage over the past two decades, the
report said.
The 2010 floods alone - which affected more
than 10 percent of the country's 180 million people - led to losses of nearly
$10 billion, about 6 percent of the country's GDP.
GAP BETWEEN POLICY AND PRACTICE
The report said that women and girls were
overlooked in the 2010 floods, prompting the government to set up a
"gender and child cell" within its national disaster management
authority.
The unit developed national policy guidelines
this year on vulnerable groups in disasters, prioritising gender issues in
monsoon contingency plans for the first time - for example in the provision of
supplies likely to be needed by women in disaster situations.
But the report said the guidelines had not yet
been implemented.
"There's definitely a gap between policies
being put in place and practice on the ground," Bungcaras said.
"There are many good examples of policies
in place, but the reality is that those policies aren't translating into better
outcomes in those communities, so there's still work to be done to make sure
national policy is translated to the local level."
Hurdles to implementing Pakistan's policy
include the fact that there are few women working in the national disaster
management system, the report said.
"There need to be more women: not only those that
understand the issue, but we need to promote more leaders. The challenge is
also to involve women and girls in the communities, for instance, such as the
Girl Guides, who have knowledge and skills relevant to disaster response,"
Farhat Sheik, programme manager of the gender and child unit, said in the
report.