General
Source: UNWomen
Disasters kill more women than men and hit women’s livelihoods hardest. According to UN reports, 60 per cent of all maternal deaths take place in humanitarian settings and all forms of gender-based violence against women and girls spike during disasters and conflict.
Experience and research show that when women are included in humanitarian action, the entire community benefits. Despite this, women and girls are often excluded from decision-making processes that shape the response strategies that affect their ability and that of their community to recover from crisis. Women must be included in decision-making about the forms of assistance, means of delivery, and the provision of the protection and economic and social empowerment opportunities they need so they can be agents of change.
At the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul from 23-24 May, UN Women is leading preparations for the High-Level Leaders’ Roundtable on Women and Girls: Catalyzing Action to Achieve Gender Equality. It will be one of seven roundtables at which leaders from Member States, the UN and multilateral actors, and civil society will come together to endorse commitments to improve humanitarian action worldwide.The five commitments to be endorsed by stakeholders at the Roundtable include:
- Empowering women and girls as leaders and increasing support for local women’s groups to participate meaningfully in humanitarian action.
- Ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights for all women and adolescent girls in crisis settings.
- Implementing a coordinated global approach to prevent and respond to gender-based violence in crisis.
- Ensuring that humanitarian programming is gender-responsive.
- Full compliance with humanitarian policies, frameworks and binding documents on gender equality, women’s empowerment and rights.
Ahead of the World Humanitarian Summit, we highlight UN Women’s continuous work to ensure equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of humanitarian action, by: making evidence of the differential impacts of disaster or conflict on women both available and understood; providing coordination so that UN and other technical teams have access to knowledge and expertise on gender; supporting capacity-building and agency of national actors, including women’s groups, parliamentarians and others; and providing targeted services, such as safe spaces or psychosocial counselling wherever there are gaps.
UN WOMEN Photo/Catiane Tijerina