Thematic Areas: Gender Equality

“To ensure women and girls, boys and men have equal access to and benefit from humanitarian assistance – we must “follow the money”. We need to know how we spend money and who benefits.
This is why we are instituting a system of tracking funding – called a gender marker.
Only in this way can we be sure we target all the population equally and make sure they receive the resources needed to help them to build back better after emergencies.”
Valerie Amos, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and
Emergency Relief Coordinator

Understanding how conflicts and disasters affect women and men, girls and boys is critical to the overall effectiveness of our humanitarian response. Women, men, girls and boys experience war, floods, earthquakes and displacement differently: they have different priorities, responsibilities and protection needs.

Women, girls, boys and men can also play different, but important, roles in responding to conflict and making decisions to resolve conflict and build peace. While women and girls are disproportionately affected during crises, they are not just victims. Gender inequalities undermine the ability of women and girls to exercise their rights and to be active partners in emergency response, rehabilitation and development.

Current activities

In 2011, OCHA will ensure that key field-based tools such as contingency plans, consolidated appeals and situation reports, use sex- and age-disaggregated data more consistently to highlight the respective needs of women, men, boys and girls, throughout the humanitarian programme cycle. All OCHA regional and country offices and HQ branches are required to develop implement and report on a Gender Action Plan (GAP). It ensures that gender equality is integrated in all relevant activities and in all areas of the work programme.

As well as promoting the collection and use of disaggregated data to improve needs analysis and programming, OCHA is using a newInter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) tool - the Gender Marker - to increase the proportion of projects that tangibly strengthen gender equality. This tool helps measure how well a humanitarian project is designed, to ensure specific gender-related needs are being addressed.

IASC Sub-working Group on Gender

OCHA is an active member of the IASC Sub-working Group on Gender (SWG), and channels most of its activities through this group. The SWG provides technical support to the IASC and works to ensure gender mainstreaming in the cluster approach, and in humanitarian emergency response in general. The group meets regularly and produces an annual work plan.

Resources

Gender Concerns – Cote d'Ivoire crisis, March 2011 [English - French] - IASC Sub-Working Group on Gender and Humanitarian Action

Tool Kit: Gender Equality, Tools to Support Implementation of OCHA’s policy on gender equality, April 2005 - OCHA

Gender Handbook [English - French - Arabic - Spansh - Chinese - Farsi], Dec 2006 - IASC

Inventory of Resources: an Annotated Bibliography of References as a Supplement to the IASC Gender Handbook in Humanitarian Action, Jan 2007 - IASC

Guidelines for Gender-based Violence (GBV) [English - French - Spanish], IASC

OCHA Gender Action Plan , 2010

Consultation on the IASC Gender Marker, Feb 2010 - IASC

Global Review of Protection for Sexual Exploitaiton and Abuse (PSEA) by UN, NGO, IOM and IFRC Personnel, July 2010

Sex and Age Matter - Disaggregated Data (SADD) Study, Aug 2011 - OCHA/Feinstein/Tufts/Care