Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Gender

The British military has faced a range of challenges when engaging with non-military actors in ‘population-centred’ counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations. Such actors include humanitarian agencies, non-government organisations, civilian populations and national and international government institutions. There has been considerable resistance, especially from the British Army, to processes that have the potential to undermine traditional military combat skills. Managing the interface with civilian organisations is the task of the tri-service British Military Stabilisation Support Group (MSSG), formerly the Joint Civil Military Cooperation Group. Members of the MSSG must learn and then embody a new set of rules and cultural codes that…

Evidence of the particular vulnerabilities of LGBTI people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) has been documented in several emergency and disaster situations. For example, men who have sex with men (MSM) in Haiti were denied food aid after the 2008 earthquake because ration schemes were targeted only at women, and these men had no women registered in their residences; transgender people reported being denied entry to IDP camps after the floods in Pakistan because they did not possess proper government ID that matched their appearance; and aravanis (feminine, male-bodied, gender-variant people) routinely faced discrimination in access to housing, medical…

Life is not easy in the Sahelian and Northern regions of Burkina Faso. These regions are characterised by arid soils, land and resource degradation and recurrent droughts, aggravated by persistent high temperatures, erratic rainfall, violent winds and deforestation. Other recurring shocks, such as epidemics and disease, further undermine development gains. Many villages are caught in a perpetual cycle of drought, floods, hunger and locust invasions. Efforts to build local communities’ resilience to these risks and crises are being put to the test by the complex and deepening food crisis across West Africa. Eighteen million people are affected, including a million…

Faith-Based Communities (FBCs) provide 40% to 50% of healthcare in developing countries and contribute greatly to HIV responses. One in five organisations working on HIV programmes are faith-based. Yet, during large-scale emergency responses, humanitarian actors have not realised the potential of FBCs to undertake HIV programming, nor have they utilised it by supporting or partnering with them. This may be due to humanitarian organisations’ preconceived ideas about FBCs’ capacity and their approaches to HIV services.A collaborative study between ODI, World Vision and Tearfund in 2009 aimed at understanding the role of Christian FBCs in responses to HIV in humanitarian settings,…

The special feature of this issue of Humanitarian Exchange focuses on humanitarian action in the Middle East.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Iraq created a ‘Women and War’ advisor position in 2008, responsible for assessing and integrating women’s needs into ICRC programmes. Although no confirmed figures exist, there are estimates of over a million women-headed households (WHHs) in Iraq. Despite limitations on access imposed by insecurity, it was possible to meet Iraqi women from all walks of life in Jordan and in more secure areas in Iraq, to discuss the problems affecting them. Based on these initial consultations and working with contacts provided by local NGOs, the ICRC organised a field survey…

Gender-just and rights-based humanitarian response, in principle and in practice, should not discriminate between majority and minority populations. However, the history of disaster responses worldwide – particularly in the aftermath of the tsunami – shows us that, for certain sections of the population, there is a high risk that their conditions and needs may be ignored unless there is a conscious effort to take their existence, vulnerabilities and differing needs into account. In the tsunami response in India, the Aravanis emerged as one such voiceless group. Gender equality and the Aravanis Gender equality posits equality between and among men and…

Khadra is four months pregnant. Her husband is chronically ill, making her the sole breadwinner for her family. Like many of the women in displaced persons settlements in Baidoa, a town now crammed with people fleeing the conflict in Mogadishu, Khadra’s only source of income has been selling firewood, which she collects by walking tens of kilometres outside Baidoa. Taking her two young daughters with her for the journey, she sells the firewood for 30,000 Somali Shillings, or just over one US dollar, on the roadside near her makeshift home, where she has been living for over a year. Not…

As part of their research in Kitgum in 2006, described in the preceding article, the Tufts team also sought to gain a better understanding of the physical threats facing women and girls living in or near IDP camps. The study team found that domestic violence against women was widespread in all the camps visited. The most common form of domestic violence is male heads-of-household beating wives or female domestic partners. The most common injuries women sustain from domestic violence include broken or dislocated arms and legs and cuts to the face, neck and upper body. These injuries are inflicted by…

CARE International has been a key partner of the World Food Programme (WFP) since the outbreak of Burundi’s civil war in 1993, distributing emergency food aid to refugees, returnees, internally displaced persons, female-headed households, orphans and other vulnerable people in 16 of Burundi’s 17 provinces. In 2005, CARE distributed over 31,000 tons of food to over 800,000 beneficiaries. As the security situation in the country has improved, the programme has moved from generalised emergency feeding to semi-regular ‘targeted distributions’. WFP and the government allocate food resources based on agricultural production and food security data (collected on a quarterly basis with…