Post 2015 HFA National Consultation
Group Work on
Key Area 4: Women as a force in resilience building, gender equality and DRR
8 January, 2014
Why have we chosen Key Area 4 as a national mandate:
Inclusion of women as a force in resilience building and gender equality in DRR is still just offered
topical attention in planning, resource allocation and implementation of resilience building and
DRR in Pakistan. Evidence from the 2011-10 Food Security Cluster appraisal on livelihoods shows
that shows that response and early recovery work still benefit the higher wealth quintiles than we
do for the poorest. Moreover women headed households house holds now feel less able to meet
their needs through their own productive efforts than before the floods. This is a worrying trend,
particularly to the extent it involves increased indebtedness.
Looking at current contingency plans of provinces and at national level the engagement of women
in DRR planning is clearly lacking in representation of their distinct needs as well as inclusion in
development of these plans.
There is a glaring deficiency in engaging females surveyors of information gatherers at nationally,
with a particular reference to cultural barriers posing as an impediment to engaging women both as
information givers and gatherers. In KP women door to door sales person, women’s role in
arranging marriages and as midwives can easily be incorporated into creating an efficient
mechanism of gathering data at door to door basis about women’s specific needs in areas of KP and
FATA.
Some good examples of leveraging existing women workforce of Lady Health Workers in KP is
available where the provincial disaster management authority is engaged in an MoU with LHW
program to ensure they are used for mapping women specific needs at household level. LHW
though burdened with a range of community health and RH outputs will under this MoU receive
capacity building on their role for strengthening DRR with women engagement.
There are very few women (less than 10%) in a joint national capacity building program of OCHA
and NDMA which is conducted for over 50 disaster affected districts across Pakistan in the last two
years it has build capacity of over 1000 first responders.
Underlying questions:
a) What are the main processes required to facilitate and ensure gender analysis in DRR and
resilience building?
Requirement to ensure gender analysis in DRR:
1. Mapping and analysis of data, to show areas of weakness and building upon the existing
work.
2. Disaster management plans developed according to this analyzed data.
3. Delegating responsibilities to local women with strong acceptability in the community,
such as Lady Health Workers. Groom them in leadership skills.
4. Skills enhancement of local and professional women to be able to respond to disasters.
5. Awareness raising of women at community level by mapping of what they are already
doing as DRR coping mechanisms without being aware of it, adding to their capacities
and integrating that with local DRR measures.
6. DRR curricula to be developed to train stakeholders in engaging the community in
gender mainstreamed DRR
7. Disaggregated data should be available on all vulnerable groups, girls, women with
disabilities, and elderly. As mentioned in the reason why there is a gap in this particular
outcome, it is suggested that local women’s social capital and capacity is used.
8. As it is clear that first responders are women at a community level. In practice, as
evident from the district level DRR trainings conducted by NDMA and OCHA,
participation of women is very low. Focus should be given to train women as first
responders.
9. Lack of women leadership in DRM at federal/ provincial level needs to be addressed.
(Women successfully operating Women Friendly Spaces in Camps)
10. Often men too become vulnerable as they take up the expected role of staying behind
and guarding properties damaged by disasters (man made or natural) and are exposed
to a range of environmental and security related threats. In the traditional arrangement
for most rural areas in Pakistan loss of a male head of household marginalizes all
member of that household.
b) What are the most effective strategies and instruments available to strengthen women’s
role in DRR? (e.g. legislation, policy, education, ,access to information, female leadership,
social protection measures)?
Mapping of effective strategies and instruments available for gender in DRR:
11. NDMA’s Management Plan (NDMP) is developed. GCC NDMA is working on National
Policy Guidelines for vulnerable groups where gender is one of four components.
Operational plans, SOPs and checklists at provincial and district levels will be developed
based on the Policy Guidelines.
12. Legislation/policy exists. Implementation, education, SOPs need to be developed with
involvement of women workers and women at decision making level to make it
inclusive.
i. What are the main barriers for making DRR gender sensitive and how can they be
addressed?
ii. How can the currently existing instruments be strengthened for better outcomes
(considering this is one of the weakest areas of progress in HFA1)?
iii. What are the required actions for the role of women in DRR and resilience building to
be formalized?
Recommendations to address barriers, and required actions:
13. Develop Rosters/ data base of capacitated/ trained/ experienced women for making
DRR plans and allocating budgets for their implementation. This needs to be maintained
and refined from time to time. Greater number of women should be trained.
14. Institutions to commit for providing facilities needed for training married women with
small children, women with disabilities and ensuring no discrimination or exclusion.
15. Documentation of best practices from field level and of gaps identified in community
level consultations involving male and female teams for a gender-balanced analysis.
16. Workers at the field level need to capture the local context in local language.
17. Gender balanced teams essential for data collection, needs assessment.
18. Greater advocacy needed for gender equity in DRR based on the evidence of exclusion
of gaps in engaging women in preparedness, mitigation and early warning system.
19. Targeting the right media for better communication with community women - like using
Radio Pakistan (national GoP channel), which has wider outreach.
20. There is a need to be innovative for documentation of local level knowledge for better
understanding of local issues (such as use of recorders).
c) What instruments need to be improved to ensure that DRR is more gender sensitive? For
example,
i. How can DRR budgets include gender budgeting?
ii. What DRR data need to become gender and age disaggregated? How to ensure data is
gender disaggregated?
iii. What are the measures to ensure that gender and age disaggregated data is used in
DRR planning and implementation
iv. What are the measures to address institutional and social aspects that make women
and children more vulnerable in disasters (protection from violence etc?)
Improved instruments:
21. Budget allocation for gender analysis and for human resource provision with women
representation in Development Planning
22. Budget allocation for trainings on gender mainstreaming and gender equality for
development planners
23. Gender certification by NDMA/PDMA so that all staff at operational level is gender
sensitized. NIDM can conduct training of trainers for this.
24. Minimum 5% budget should be allocated to gender in national disaster management
budget (latter also needs to be allocated.)
25. Compliant to IASC guidelines, GBV gender and protection guidelines and sphere
standards as well as national legislations for protection against sexual harassment and
codes of conduct.
26. Camp arrangements need to be engendered. Maintaining privacy and cultural
sensitivities should be ensured in SOPs.
27. Complaint and referral mechanisms to be developed for GBV and linking communities’
feedback to concerned authorities.
28. GBV incident reporting form to be used by DRR professionals to ensure protection.
d) Who should be responsible for addressing gender issues in DRR?
i. Who should be responsible to ensure that women’s role is recognized and formalized?
ii. Who should they be accountable to?
iii. How to ensure accountability frameworks are inclusive and captures women’s social
and economic functions and role
iv. What targets and indicators could be used to measure progress and underpin
accountability?
v. How can these targets and indicators be monitored and measured?
Responsibilities for addressing gender issues in DRR
29. NIDM to be responsible for gender sensitization of DRM planners and practitioners. This
should be made mandatory for all the R/PDMAs/ NDMA/ DDMAs.
30. NIDM should develop & maintain roster of all trained professionals (especially women)
at government level with a parallel roster of I/NGO based data collectors.
31. Greater visibility to women with disabilities and women local leadership.
32. Disaster management should be taken as a National/Federal subject, where all the
authorities are accountable and responsible for the NDMP and this should be
accordingly budgeted by GoP in its 5-Year Annual Development Plans.
33. As DRR is linked with development. P&D/ Planning Commission should be responsible
for integrating DRR into development, ensuring gender equality. Disaster management
authorities should be responsible for preparing inclusive contingency plans, DM plans
and district level plans.
34. Donors can help to ensure gender accountability in approval of projects for funding.