WUNRN
HOW TO MAKE WOMEN SAFER IN DISASTERS – ADDRESS INEQUALITY
A relative holds newly born baby Beatriz as her mother
recuperates at a makeshift birthing clinic in Tacloban, Central Philippines.
Photo: Reuters/Erik De Castro
SENDAI, Japan, March 14, 2015 (Thomson
Reuters Foundation) - Women's vulnerability to disasters is a sign not of
weakness but of inequality, and barriers to women taking the lead in protecting
themselves must be removed, top politicians and officials told a U.N.
conference on Saturday.
Philippine Senator Loren Legarda said
statistics showed women face greater risks in times of disaster.
In the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for example,
women accounted for 70 percent of the deaths in Aceh, Indonesia, and parts of
India. Most residents trapped in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were
African-American women and their children, she said.
The situation persists following disasters too,
Legarda added. Pregnant and lactating women have special needs that are often
neglected, and women are more prone to sexual abuse, trafficking and other
forms of violence in the aftermath of disasters, she said.
"These realities show that even in
disaster impacts, there is no equality," she told the meeting in the
northeastern city of Sendai, where a new global plan to reduce the risk of
disasters is due to be adopted Wednesday.
Emiko Okuyama, the mayor of Sendai, where
around 1,000 citizens died and 1 in 10 people had to leave their homes when a
huge earthquake and tsunami struck in March 2011, said evacuation centres did
not respond to women's needs at the time because they were mainly run by men.
Women reported that they had nowhere to change
their clothes or breastfeed, and no separate bathroooms, which made them feel
unsafe. They lacked sanitary products and were not offered enough different
sizes of underwear, Okuyama told a session on mobilising women's leadership to
combat disasters.
"If women are not involved in planning on
a regular basis, it will be difficult for them to be involved at the time of a
disaster," she said.
In the case of Sendai, only around 10 percent of
city staff working on disaster risk reduction - which includes preventing and
responding to emergencies - were women at the time of the 2011 crisis. The city
hall is now working to change that, although promoting women's participation in
Japan is tough due to entrenched inequalities, Okuyama said.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe noted in a
speech that women are now represented in all prefectural disaster management
councils, compared with only around half a decade ago.
"We believe that women's leadership is...
essential in order to stand up to disasters," he said.
A plan announced by Japan on Saturday to train
40,000 officials and community members around the world to play leading roles
in disaster risk reduction and reconstruction will include a project for women,
Abe said.
In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which hit
the Philippines in 2013, Japan focused its assistance on women, he added. It
reconstructed agricultural processing plants that employed many women before
the disaster, and built childcare facilities so they could get back to work
more easily.
SMART INVESTMENT
Also in response to Haiyan, the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA) commissioned mobile hospitals that could cater to
women's needs in the hard-hit city of Tacloban, according to the agency's
director, Babatunde Osotimehin.
"We make sure that we don't just do
interventions for the purpose of the time - we also try to build
resilience," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
For example, in the three West African
countries hit by the Ebola epidemic - Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea - the
UNFPA is setting up midwife services, so that women and children do not die
from causes relating to pregnancy and childbirth because people have become
reluctant to visit hospitals.
The hope is that the initiative will show the
importance of well-staffed primary healthcare services, Osotimehin said.
While there have been improvements in awareness
of, and response to, the problems facing women in disasters and conflicts -
progress that is reflected in the draft of the new disaster reduction framework
- there is still some way to go, he added.
Senator Legarda argued that calls for women to
become leaders in protecting themselves and their communities from disasters
would be "futile" unless they were educated and given fair job
opportunities, reversing social and cultural constraints on their actions.
Former president of Finland, Tarja Halonen,
said women could do much more in disaster risk reduction if they were provided
with additional resources and education.
"It is a very smart investment," she said. "By
empowering women, we enable them to take the right decisions for their family,
but also the whole community, so men benefit too." (Reporting by Megan
Rowling; editing by Laurie Goering)