Julie Lafrenière, Caroline Sweetman, Theresia Thylin. Gender & Development. Volume 27, Issue 2. 2019.
Conflicts and disasters around the world have left an estimated 131.7 million people in need of international humanitarian assistance to survive, maintain life, and meet essential needs for resources, security, and protection (OCHA 2018a, 4). By the end of 2018, 70.8 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide (UNHCR 2019, 2). The global population of forcibly displaced increased by 2.3 million people in 2018, and there were 37,000 new displacements every day (ibid.). Roughly half of all these displaced persons are women and girls, who are differently and often disproportionately affected by both disasters and violent conflicts.
During and after crises, pre-existing gender inequality and discrimination create particular challenges for women and girls. As a result, many endure extreme hardships, including increased insecurity, restricted mobility, sexual exploitation and abuse, and gender-based violence (GBV) (ICRC 2018). Women’s livelihoods also tend to be disproportionally affected (CARE International 2017), and girls in crisis are more likely than boys to lose out on education (UNHCR n.d.). At the same time, the lack of healthcare in humanitarian settings has particular impact on women’s sexual and reproductive health needs: 60 per cent of preventable maternal deaths take place in emergency settings (UNFPA 2015, 4).
In an emergency, pre-existing gender inequality and discrimination tend to be further exacerbated, due to sudden shifts in gender roles and relations. Gendered social norms affect women’s and girls’ ability to make decisions, to propose solutions, and to lead, constraining women’s lives and choices. In addition, they also affect the ability of households and wider communities to recover from crisis. Research shows that when women are involved in prevention and crisis response, it leads to better humanitarian outcomes and lowers risks (UN Women 2015). Gender equality programming thereby generates a more effective humanitarian response and a more efficient use of the limited funds available for such responses.
An accountable, efficient and transparent humanitarian system that saves more lives, should recognise and value women’s agency and gender-specific needs. It should support women’s empowerment and community leadership, prevent and respond to violence against women, advance gender equality, and support long-term development as a fundamental goal.
Yet, as the articles in this issue show, while there are many promising efforts underway, these insights are not yet translating into widespread sustained change on the ground. The specific needs of women and girls continue to be inadequately addressed by humanitarian responders. The link between gendered needs, and the underlying gender inequality they arise from, is still poorly understood by many humanitarian policymakers and practitioners. We know from around the world that in the majority of humanitarian responses, even basic gender mainstreaming—let alone gender-transformative programming, or an intersectional feminist approach—is not done consistently, to enhance the effectiveness of humanitarian action.
For humanitarian responses to respond to the needs of whole communities affected by crises, they need to be based on a power analysis that encompasses gender, age, disability, ethnicity, and other aspects of identity. An intersectional feminist approach is badly needed, therefore, to change the way humanitarians prepare, prevent, respond and recover from crisis. Programming needs to be based on accurate understandings of how gender and other inequalities affect women’s and girls’ daily lives and their status in the community.
There is growing recognition of the importance of women’s participation in humanitarian action. Yet the leadership roles that women play as early responders and promoters of community resilience are still not fully acknowledged or utilised. Investment in gender equality programming is difficult to track (even with the use of tools like the IASC Gender and Age Marker), but it is clearly apparent that it is chronically underfunded. Gender-based violence (GBV) services accounted for just 0.12 percent of all humanitarian funding between 2016-2018, which is on average less than USD$2.00 to each targeted woman or girl at risk of GBV in crisis and conflict settings (IRC and Voice 2019, 9). In 2019, 0.3 per cent of humanitarian funding was channelled towards GBV violence programming (Financial Tracking System 2019, no page number). It is critical that we see greater investment in gender equality programming, and funding to women’s rights organisations who play a key complementary role.
The articles in this issue are written by feminists offering state-of-the-art analyses and accounts of a wide range of current work and concerns. These include: the use of gender-analysis tools for research that empowers participants; prevention and protection from gender-based violence (GBV); cash programming directed at women seen from a feminist perspective; the stress and resilience implications of working in humanitarian response according to race, gender and other aspects of identity; and gendered issues in disease outbreak preparedness and response.
Authors also share insights into the challenges faced by local women’s organisations negotiating a balance between responsiveness to women’s own priorities and the requirements of donors and international partner organisations, and the experiences of local women volunteering in emergency responses in a context of increased international commitment to the agenda of ‘localisation’. The use of innovative methods to advance transformative agendas is another key focus in this issue. Examples include the use of emerging technologies to deliver better and more empowering support to women; and action research and advocacy methods which are being used with women who have faced extreme forms of GBV in conflict.
This is a huge and varied range of concerns, which we will explore in more details below. But first, we offer a little context.
The Context of this Issue
Currently, there are a host of factors in the global, regional and national context that make it all the more urgent to make real progress on integrating gender and women’s rights issues into humanitarian action and crisis response.
To start with, more people are exposed to conflict and this number is only expected to rise. In 2017, 2 billion people were living in fragile and conflict-affected contexts (World Bank 2017, no page number). By 2030, forecasts suggest that around half of the world’s extreme poor will live in such contexts (World Bank 2019, no page number). Additionally, crises have now become more protracted. The average humanitarian crisis now lasts more than nine years, compared to 5.2 years in 2014 (OCHA 2018b, no page number). Currently, a few long-enduring crises are absorbing the majority of available resources. Between 2014 and 2018, just four crises—Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Syria—accounted for 55 per cent of all humanitarian funding (ibid.).
These enduring crises generate more and longer displacements, which now average an astonishing 26 years duration (UNHCR 2016, 20). Without increased efforts to seek political solutions that bring conflicts to an end, and create the necessary conditions for a safe return where gender equality is a possibility, and appropriate conflict prevention measures, displacement will remain the only scenario for millions of women, men, girls and boys.
Climate-related shocks, created and exarcerbated by unsustainable development, are becoming more intense and more frequent. The increased risk of extreme weather events is being driven by irreversible climate change, following 43 consecutive years of above-average global land and sea surface temperatures (NOAA 2019, no page number). There were 330 natural catastrophe events in 2017 that generated economic losses of USD353 billion—of which 97 per cent (USD344 billion) was due to weather-related events, including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in the US and Caribbean, plus Typhoon Hato in China and Cyclone Debbie in Australia (Aon Benfield 2018 1). For historical context, 2017’s natural catastrophe losses were 93 per cent higher versus the 2000-2016 average (ibid.). It is estimated that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will seriously damage human health and cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year just from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress (WHO 2018, no page number).
Currently, we are seeing worsening extreme economic inequality and polarising political tensions, often mapped along identity lines, in many parts of the world. Alarmingly, many of the strides towards equality and human rights during the past fifty years are being arrested, challenged and even rolled back, by reactionary forces across the world. Many focus on women and LGBTQI+ people, reinstating and reaffirming inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, class and others. We are living in an era where principles of international humanitarian law are often not respected by either states or non-state actors, and where war is being waged against women’s rights through their bodies.
In this era of challenges to gender equality, human rights, and humanitarian principles, and growing numbers and intensity of crises around the world, women and girls are at the sharp end. Impunity for perpetrators of violence against women remains rampant. Yet this is also the era of #Metoo and #Aidtoo, where women are making their voices heard, and perpetrators of abuse are being called out, often for the first time.
Policy Factors Framing this Issue
There have been decades of feminist influencing, lobbying and practical action to ensure gender-responsive humanitarian responses. Since Gender & Development’s last issue on Post-Disaster Humanitarian Work was published in 2012, much has happened in the international humanitarian space. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC)2 has adopted a revised Policy on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (2017), accompanied by a Gender Accountability Framework (2017), to help hold the IASC and its bodies accountable to the commitments they have made. Through annual reporting against a comprehensive framework of indicators, the mechanism aims to highlight progress made towards these commitments, as well as persisting challenges3. Other important developments within the humanitarian field include the New Way of Working (NWOW) being embraced as the vehicle to bridge the humanitarian-development-peace divide and enhance coordination for common outcomes.
Important commitments were made at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in humanitarian action. As a result of the Summit, the largest donors and humanitarian aid organisations also agreed on a ‘Grand Bargain’4. The Grand Bargain aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian action, and to get more means into the hands of people in need. It includes commitments to improved accountability, better management and coordination of resources, and innovative financing arrangements. Yet, the original commitments of the Grand Bargain were largely gender-blind, and failed to acknowledge the importance of integrating gender equality and women’s and girls’ empowerment outcomes into humanitarian action. Several of the Grand Bargain signatories have acknowledged this, and later made efforts to improve the gender aspects of the processes following the original bargain.
Increasing support and funding tools for local and national responders to become the central actors in humanitarian action was a key theme of the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) of 2016. ‘Localisation’ is at the heart of the Grand Bargain. Yet disturbingly, local women’s organisations and women responders have been largely overlooked and continue to struggle for resources, recognition and support. The success of the localisation agenda depends on meaningful engagement with and investment in women and women’s rights organisations as local and first responders, and on recognising women’s existing leadership in local response and their potential for more. While important policy commitments have indeed been made over the last few years, these commitments remain difficult to translate into action and painfully much is left to be done.
Women Responders, Unpaid and Paid Work, and Women’s Organisations in Crises
A range of articles included in this issue focus on women’s participation, partnership, capacity and leadership. All these are familiar terms for humanitarian actors, but demand to be thought of afresh if the participation and localisation agenda is to support gender equality, women’s rights, and more effective humanitarian programming. Women in communities, and their groups and organisations, are rooted in intimate and detailed knowledge of their contexts. They are uniquely able to work across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus in ways that respond to short-term immediate needs with an eye to the longer-term needs that are rooted in the pre-crisis period, before disease pandemics, floods or famine, or armed conflict hit their community. And they will be the ones to pick up the pieces and continue this work post-crisis.
Women Key Responders
In her article in this issue, Julia Smith reflects on the immensely important role women play as responders in crisis caused by disease outbreak, including through providing unpaid care work for families and communities. This role becomes all the more critical in a time of crisis where women commonly end up placing their own wellbeing at risk in order to ensure the survival of family members. Women find food, water and shelter, provide health-care and protect their family members in the most extreme circumstances. Humanitarian actors need to recognise this work, and to ensure their responses complement it rather than hinder it. Where women need information or other support, they should provide it.
Julia Smith focuses on the contribution of women unpaid family carers to the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The majority of care was provided by women, many of whom continue to suffer today from the psychological trauma from being solely responsible for the ill and from the fear of contracting and passing on the virus. Humanitarian assistance and other forms of crisis intervention need to tread carefully to avoid exploiting and reinforcing gender roles and relations that increase women’s risks, undermining their coping strategies or obliging them to continue damaging strategies to survive and cope. In other words, as Julia Smith says,
the care work provided by women should be supported, while providing alternatives that empower women. (this issue, 363)
Volunteering, Women, and Empowerment
One way of ensuring local people’s knowledge and skills inform responses is to involve them as volunteers. In their article, Jessica Cadesky, Matt Baillie Smith and Nisha Thomas share key findings from the Volunteers in Conflicts and Emergencies (ViCE) Initiative. ViCE explores gender issues in volunteering in emergencies, as seen through the eyes of local women volunteers. As noted above, throughout the world, women operate as unpaid carers keeping societies and economies functioning, and this work goes largely unrecognised and undervalued. Poverty and crisis make this unpaid work even more critical for survival. This makes it imperative for humanitarian responders to understand the scope and extent of this unpaid care work and to work with women carers.
This analysis clearly has resonances for all humanitarian actors that involve local people in their crisis responses. While the push to involve local people in delivering—and defining—good responses is critical, this requires conscious attention to gendered roles and relations and to the powerful social norms that determine what we think of as ‘men’s work’—paid work that appears technical or professional in nature—and ‘women’s work’—often unpaid and resembling their role in families and communities.
As this article suggests, to provide a gender-transformative experience for local women volunteers requires humanitarians a commitment to challenging social norms around gender roles and work. It starts with respect for the time and work of the volunteers. It requires investing in them, consciously supporting them to gain experience that may transfer later into paid work, and not exploiting them or inadvertently exposing them to the hazards of risk, overwork or abuse. As this article highlights, women’s participation as volunteers needs to be valued, and individual women invested in, for this to be empowering for them into the future.
Local Women’s Organisations: Towards Empowering Partnerships
A key means of involving local women in ways that potentially allow them to set the agenda for humanitarian response is for international responders to work in partnership with local women’s organisations. Yet the power relations that operate between international agencies with relatively high levels of resourcing and authority on the world stage, and local organisations, can so often lead to a sense of ‘unequal partnership’, and to mission drift for the local organisation during the crisis. Yet a local women’s organisation can provide invaluable expert insights into the needs and priorities of women in the area which can at best lead to effective short-term response that empowers women into the longer term, enabling genuine transformation.
In their article in this issue, Champa Patel and Maria Al-Abdeh share the experiences of Women Now for Development, a women’s organisation working with Syrian women in Syria and neighbouring countries. They consider whether important policy commitments to empowering local actors are bearing fruit in practice—whether localisation is more than a current ‘buzz-word’—and identify some of the challenges that still frustrate working with women and girls in humanitarian settings. Local organisations exist to further the interests of women in communities where gender inequality is rooted in the social norms that pre-exist armed conflict and the need for crisis support. Gender equality and women’s empowerment demand a change in social norms and mindsets.
With this set of issues in mind, the authors share, from personal insider experience, the challenges of partnership with international actors and donors whose expectations and requirements can affect day-to-day operations of small local women’s rights organisations. Both this exceptionally honest and constructive article, and the ViCE research discussed by Jessica Cadesky et al., highlight the need for humanitarian actors to understand gender inequality as pre-existing in any community, weakening women’s bargaining power and violating their rights. They also show that it is essential to address gender inequality not only to meet the immediate aims of crisis response, but as a key to preventing future crises and building resilience.
Women’s rights organisations understand the foundational importance of involving and representing women in these locations, of gaining detailed knowledge of how gender roles and relations play out in different contexts, and the need for co-creation of crisis responses with these women. Then, and only then, will humanitarian responses work well for women and girls, in ways that ensure the longer-term feminist work they undertake is supported rather than eroded by foreign presences aiming to help, but who are often thinking in short-term ways and lacking contextual understanding of gender. Long-term work is needed, that takes into account gender dynamics and aims to change them. Collaborative multi-year planning and funding is an ideal opportunity to make progress towards gender-responsive humanitarian action.
Feminists Working in Professional Humanitarian Response
In addition to the importance of ensuring gender-responsive localisation of humanitarian action, what is also critical is transforming the institutions at national and international level where women staff are still in a small minority in the departments and units that are concerned with crisis response. The participation of women in aid work is critical for effective gender-transformative responses to crisis. Yet the aid industry is increasingly being critiqued in the era of #AidToo for its male-dominated culture. Gemma Houldey’s article argues that transforming working environments which are characterised by machismo and gendered, racialised ideas about the ‘perfect humanitarian’ is a critical step in getting humanitarian response right for all—both workers and the populations they are charged with supporting. Gemma Houldey focuses on the aid industry and the different experiences of local, national and international humanitarian staff working in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, and in a camp setting in northern Kenya.
Currently, the issues of stress, resilience and mental health are coming under increasing scrutiny for many in the aid sector, and some of the most interesting work to focus on these issues comes from intersectional feminist researchers. As Gemma Houldey and other authors in this issue show, the conditions in which humanitarian work takes place are punishing. Despite this, women are working—in growing numbers—inside the organisations, in the full range of roles, from technical staff to gender specialists tasked with researching and implementing programming aimed at achieving gender justice for women as an aim in its own right. These jobs within the humanitarian response agencies themselves demand real heroism and resilience from women staff. A critical question is how to support them and how to speedily move on from the current situation where they hear about #AidToo and how it may change their industry, yet currently see little change.
This is a theme which Gender & Development journal will return to in early 2020, with an issue titled Re-imagining Development. The need for self-care is clear, but so too is the need for senior leadership across the sector to put words into action and consciously make changes which sweep away cultures that permit abuses of many kinds to thrive.
On the Vanguard of Gender Responsive Humanitarian Programming: Case Studies and Lessons Learned
If working environments are transformed within humanitarian response, the work of the organisations is much more likely to become responsive to gender concerns faced by women and girls in the populations these organisations are mandated to support. The second part of this Issue therefore focus on particularly interesting examples of gender responsive humanitarian programming.
Transforming Physical Environments to Make Them Safe for Women
Michelle Farrington’s article focuses on a more literal and tangible environment—that of the refugee camp—which needs to be made safe and empowering for women. She focuses on social and feminist design in emergency contexts, and the intuitive link that exists between the identity of the specialist designing an intervention, and the kind of intervention that specialist will design. The article focuses on the Women’s Social Architecture Project, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
The context of the article is the rapid influx of Rohingya refugees into Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, since 25 August 2017, which has led to the formation of huge camps, built on difficult terrain, short of space and with high population density. Cox’s Bazar and situations like it present numerous challenges to agencies including Oxfam that provide clean water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities for refugees. Feedback gathered from women and girls in different settings highlights significant challenges with WASH facilities around access, safety, privacy and dignity, including management of personal hygiene and menstruation.
Acknowledging the challenges of moving past this set of issues, Oxfam implemented the Women’s Social Architecture Project to work with women and adolescent girls, and female architects with a background or interest in social or feminist design and architecture, to add a different perspective into the design and siting of WASH facilities. The project has consisted of formative research with Rohingya women and girls, and design workshops with architects in which Rohingya women have co-created designs that tackle the issues they face regarding WASH facilities. This article provides an account of the progress to date, together with feedback from women and girls and the WASH Sector in Cox’s Bazar ahead of the final completion of the project in March 2019.
Cash-based Interventions: Intended and Unintended Impacts on Gender Relations
Putting cash in women’s hands in humanitarian settings has long been recognised for its empowerment potential (UN Women 2018). After all, money is power. In development settings, the link between cash and power can be tracked from income-generation projects of the 1970s, through micro-finance approaches in the 1980s and 1990s, to the ‘women’s economic empowerment’ (WEE) approaches common today. Cash assistance in humanitarian settings also has a fairly long history and a focus on gender in cash and voucher assistance (CVA) has gained significant momentum. Put simply, it can mean control is in the hands of those requiring assistance in a way that is much less likely to happen with in-kind assistance such as food distributions. One question for the cash community remains whether cash-based interventions can contribute to achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment, as ends in themselves.
No intervention is a perfect solution, and evidence of the impact of cash-based interventions on gender roles and power relations has been mixed over the years (UN Women 2018). Putting control of cash into women’s hands in households where gender norms see men as the primary providers can create protection risks for women, at least in the short term. In this issue, Alexandra Blackwell Jean Casey, Rahmah Habeeb, Jeannie Annan, and Kathryn Falb present experience from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) of offering cash and voucher assistance in emergency settings. This article presents findings from an evaluation of a cash programme in Raqqa Governorate, Syria. The aim was to examine the effect of a cash for basic needs programme on gender roles and power relations. While the programme under scrutiny did not aim to change power dynamics, an injection of cash controlled by women did nevertheless do so. Among other aspects this article focuses on the incidence of violence against women, and gender relations within families and households
The research very interestingly shows both positive and negative impacts. Cash channelled to households via women enabled women to repay debts and achieve greater economic independence. But it was also linked by women to increased tension and abuse within both the community and the household, in some cases. The message comes across as a positive but nuanced one: to ensure the positive impact is maximised and the negative minimised, it is necessary to integrate gender-sensitive approaches into programme design and monitoring to reduce risk to different women in different household forms.
More research is needed in different settings of different interventions offering cash: so much is about context and about the different situations faced by women according to their marital status, household form, age and other factors. The evidence-base on the gender dynamics of cash assistance needs to be clear and available to women and their groups and organisations, and cash-based interventions should work with both sexes to address the risks and emphasise the opportunities. Women, and women’s organisations, as well as others, should be able to participate and have an equal say in the design, management and evaluation of cash-based interventions.
New Technologies and Their Potential for Women’s Empowerment in Crisis
Humanitarians are increasingly looking to innovation and emerging technologies to overcome critical challenges. As emerging technologies are rapidly being introduced to support work across a wide number of areas of humanitarian action, in this issue we take a closer look at the use of blockchain technology in humanitarian settings, and its potential impact on women and girls. The article by Theresia Thylin and María Fernanda Novelo Duarte draws on experiences emerging from UN Women’s explorations of blockchain technology and the first gender-responsive pilot targeting Syrian refugee women through UN Women’s cash-for-work programme in Jordan. The article also explores gender-related risks of the use of blockchain technology in humanitarian settings.
The article reminds us how important it is to introduce technologies in ways that maximise their potential to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in humanitarian settings, and minimise the risk of doing harm. As humanitarian actors start piloting blockchain, this article can serve as an important starting point for further efforts to ensure that blockchain-based solutions are able to serve diverse groups of women and girls in humanitarian settings.
Researching Gender Roles and Relations in a Time of Crisis and Humanitarian Need
How can research best be done in humanitarian crisis, where access to populations may be extremely difficult, immediate needs vast in populations affected by thirst and hunger, disease, enduring lack of shelter and trauma resulting from displacement, loss, violence and trauma?
Policy commitments have been made, both through the IASC Gender Policy and the Grand Bargain to ensure ‘joint and impartial needs assessments’ which are ‘unbiased, comprehensive, context-sensitive, timely and up-to-date’ (ICVA 2017, 2). This requires both quantitative research including collecting sex- and age-disaggregated data, and qualitative research, incorporating proper analysis of gender dynamics and their effects on populations, to ensure holistic gender analysis in humanitarian response.
In this issue, Isadora Quay of the INGO CARE discusses the development of its own system of gender analysis, ‘Rapid Gender Analysis’ (RGA), during the humanitarian response in Syria. The particular challenges of the needs for speed and immediacy in emergency response have challenged many humanitarian responders struggling with the awareness of the need for a detailed high-quality gender analysis of each particular conflict: the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ has often resulted in speedy responses that have been less effective for women—indeed often less effective in their own aims concerned with water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and other urgent needs.
Isadora Quay’s article focuses on these dilemmas and the ways in which RGA is able to help provide high-quality analysis at speed. It also focuses on other realities of the humanitarian environment where great demands are often made of staff who may lack experience or confidence in relation to gender issues. The article tracks and reviews a sample of the first 50 CARE RGA reports to share recurrent gender themes that emerge across them, including the lack of women’s meaningful participation in decision making, limitations on women and girls’ mobility, increased risks of gender-based violence, and recurring issues facing humanitarian organisations in providing a gender-sensitive response. RGA has now been featured as a good practice in the revised Inter-Agency Standing Committee Gender Handbook (2018). It is giving humanitarians faster and more complete access to information about gender norms than ever before. But, this article asks, has the RGA made a difference and, if so, to whom?
Gender-based Violence in Crisis Settings: Prevention and Response
Research in humanitarian settings raises obvious and critical questions about ethics. Immediate needs are present and require a response. But sharing information can be terrifying and traumatic for those most in need. In their article here, written by Grace Acan, Evelyn Amony, John Harris, and Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, a transformative method of research is discussed which aims to go beyond the research principle of ‘do no harm’, to help heal the traumas inflicted on women in the post-crisis context.
This article offers valuable insights for humanitarian responders: it presents original photovoice evidence from 13 co-researchers; all members of the Women’s Advocacy Network, a grass-roots organisation seeking to improve life in northern Uganda for women. All the co-researchers are from the Acholi ethnic group, and were formerly abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. They are all engaged in rebuilding their lives in Gulu, northern Uganda. The article seeks to present the work of the co-researchers and explores the long-term needs they identify for formerly abducted women in conflict zones. It also explores how their own experiences with abduction continue to erode the recognition of their humanity, both in terms of how they are perceived by their communities and how they view themselves, and how they are individually and collectively working to reassert their place in the moral universe.
There are lessons here for all involved in humanitarian response. The Grand Bargain has a commitment to promote a ‘Participation Revolution’ with the stated aim of ensuring that “voices of the most vulnerable groups considering gender, age, ethnicity, language and special needs are heard and acted upon”. This requires humanitarian workers and researchers to conduct research for programme planning that recognise and include the most marginalised women and girls, to ensure their voice and engagement, through approaches such as distinct spaces and opportunities for women and girls to voice needs, concerns, and opinions adequately and comfortably.
In another article in this issue, we focus on a method of working with women and girls in humanitarian settings that aims to support survivors of GBV, while challenging the social norms that make GBV so hard to end, perpetuating it and normalising it. Prevention of future violence involves focusing on those norms and engaging women and girls, but also—critically—the men and boys to transform harmful gender norms. In their article, Sophie Namy, Natsnet Ghebrebrhan, Mercy Lwambi, Rahma Hassan, Sophia Wanjiku, Jennifer Wagman, Lori Michau discuss how the SASA! Approach was used by the International Refugee Committee (IRC).
SASA! Is a community mobilisation approach that was developed in Uganda by Raising Voices, with the aim of preventing violence against women. SASA! proved effective in development settings, for reducing intimate partner violence against women, and has since been used in over 25 countries worldwide. This article, like the article by Isadora Quay focusing on gender analysis for research, considers how an approach developed for international development community-level use can be adapted in an innovative way that makes it useful in the context of a crisis and its aftermath. The article shares learning from the implementation of SASA! in Dadaab, Kenya. In particular, it focuses on how the refugee camp setting shapes the adaptation and delivery of the SASA! Programme. It explores the balance to be struck between fidelity to the SASA! Methodology as it has been developed and tested in various settings, and adaptations to make it suitable for use in this specific humanitarian context.
We had hoped to commission articles in this Issue that focus on specific groups from an intersectional feminist perspective, including an article on the use of safe spaces with adolescent girls specifically as well as articles looking beyond the gender binary on issues affecting sexual and gender minorities in crisis settings but were in the end unable to realise this aspiration. We hope that by the time Gender & Development returns to the issues of humanitarian action, the articles will reflect even more intersectional evidence as well as progress made for women’s leadership and participation.
Conclusion
Important commitments have been made to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in humanitarian action in the last couple of years. Still, large gaps exist between these commitments and the actions needed to affect the lives of women and girls in humanitarian settings.
While the humanitarian sector’s willingness and capacity to work towards gender equality and empower women and girls remains woefully inadequate, the articles in this issue provide much needed examples of innovative and inspiring work happening to make the transformative change required. The integration of gender analysis and the participation of women’s rights activists at all stages of response, from initial baseline research, through implementation of programming with women and girls—and men and boys—on gender issues, to evaluation and beyond are important steps forward.
To ensure transformative change for women and girls at a point of increasingly more complex and protracted crises around the world and a global backlash against women’s rights, we need to ensure that local, national and international women’s organisations receive recognition and financial support to exert leadership and provide expertise across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus.
Co-ordinated action by all humanitarian actors, supported by a robust accountability mechanism, adequate resources, partnerships, and innovative approaches, is needed to support and empower crisis-affected women and girls. This special edition seeks to strengthen the evidence base for gender responsive humanitarian programming. The international community must invest in replicating initiatives that work, and close the rampant gender gaps in humanitarian action and crisis response. if it is to advance gender equality, and defend, assert and expand women’s rights.