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©UN-HABITAT
Women are increasingly involved in UN-HABITAT post-crisis reconstruction work. In Asia and the Pacific, nearly 80% of UN-HABITAT’s work is around disasters
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Approximately 1 million families and over 5 million people around the world were made homeless by conflict and natural disasters in 2007 and climate change continues to pose further disaster risks.
UN-HABITAT’s work in disaster management strives for gender equality in post-crisis reconstruction, land administration and, lastly, governance, which manages these efforts, enlists technical expertise, allocates resources and often decides who participates. Disasters and armed conflicts place extra burdens on women as caregivers, and put them at heightened risk of exploitation and gender-based violence.
In temporary shelter provided in camps, women also suffer more than men from a lack of privacy and inadequate provision for personal hygiene.
However, the often-overlooked input from women in designing and implementing disaster-related programmes helps to address these problems. It also brings about overall improvements to disaster responses—from emergency relief, to rebuilding homes, to re-establishing livelihoods. Working with governments, other UN agencies and non-governmental development partners in Africa, the Americas, Arab States, Asia and Europe, UN-HABITAT is striving to ensure women have the same opportunities as men to share their skills, knowledge and leadership in disaster management activities. Increasingly, this includes disaster mitigation and disaster risk reduction, for example in areas prone to flooding or when extreme weather patterns can be predicted. In Lira, Northern Uganda, community members, including a significant number of women actively took part in reconstruction efforts supported by UN-HABITAT. They received training on building techniques in order to build homes for teachers and health workers returning to the region after fierce conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army and government forces. Channeling both men and women’s energy and labour provided a more cost-effective way to build a greater number of homes. It also united the communities in coming to terms with two decades of conflict that has displaced 1.5 million people and caused mass suffering, including often horrific examples of gender-based violence inflicted on women.
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©UN-HABITAT/Caylee Hong
A woman in Lira, Uganda decorates a home in a housing construction project for internally displaced people |
In Afghanistan, which has also suffered from decades of fighting and destruction, gender-responsive programming in a UN-HABITAT-led programme has brought about very visible improvements to informal settlements in three municipalities, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad. It has also given women greater opportunities to participate in community development activities traditionally dominated by men. The project mobilised Community Development Councils (CDC’s), half of which were women-led. The women’s CDC’s implemented training projects on income-generating skills, such as tailoring and carpet weaving, as well as projects to improve urban infrastructure—such as improved water and drainage services, access to electricity and increased security through wider roads. UN-HABITAT has a strong track record of promoting gender-responsive tools for post-crisis management, including the publication of the Iraq Gender Toolkit and the Kosovo Gender Tool Kit. In 2008, UN-HABITAT joined the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the primary international mechanism for inter-agency humanitarian assistance. This will strengthen partnership working on disaster and crisis relief, with UN-HABITAT providing technical expertise on housing, land and property related issues. Related links:
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