Enhancing Resilience Through Gender Equality - Gender Equality and Women's Voice in Asia-Pacific Resilience Programming Research Report

“…highly gendered roles and responsibilities result in gender imbalances in women’s workloads, recognition, and access to and control of resources and power within homes, communities and authorities, which in turn reduces their ability to adopt effective strategies to prepare, adapt and respond to disasters and climate change.”

Based on evidence from CARE’s work in the Asia-Pacific region, this research report provides insights into their efforts to assess and address women’s vulnerability and capacity to adapt, and to promote and enhance gender equity in the context of programmes intended to increase resilience to disaster and climate change, particularly among women and girls. The research focuses specifically on how, and how effectively, CARE used: women-focused participatory, rights-based approaches; and activities to analyse underlying causes of gender inequities and to promote and enhance gender equitable social relations within resilience-related programming.  The report also offers recommendations for targeting future programmes to maximise gender equity and women’s voices while strengthening resilience, and to multiply programme impact over time.

The report focuses on CARE Australia programmes implemented in Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu and Vietnam between 2011 and 2015. The data were drawn from a document review, a survey on CARE tools, and direct participatory engagement with key informants in Papua New Guinea and with CARE headquarters and field staff. The report describes CARE’s efforts to make resilience programmes in the six countries more responsive to the underlying gender equity issues. It describes the programmes’ experiences with: building agency, solidarity and leadership among women and girls; changing gender relationships to enhance women’s rights, representation and influence; and transforming discriminatory social norms, customs, values, exclusionary practices, laws, policies, procedures and services within civil society, government and the private sector.  Their strategies have included:

• holding separate focus group discussions for women, girls, men and boys at times that support women’s attendance so that all are able to voice their concerns and issues, and including these in project plans and activities.
• implementing programmes that involve both sexes working together to achieve improvements so that both women and men learn that women have the knowledge and skills, and that by men supporting them, together they can achieve change.

Case studies from Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu and Vietnam are presented in Annex 1.

The report discusses CARE’s use of a variety of participatory risk assessment and gender analysis tools and approaches in different contexts in its Asia region programmes to better understand how gender and other factors intersect to influence people’s vulnerability. Annex 4 briefly describes the purposes of tools that support gender, disaster risk reduction and climate change in the context of:

• frameworks supporting programme quality, community-based assessment and gender equality
• analysis and design
• implementation
• monitoring, evaluation and learning
• organisational culture and capacity building.

Recommendations include:

• Invest in context-specific analysis to understand the interconnected factors shaping women’s and men’s aspirations;
• Consider how activities may impact on a range of gendered dimensions and ask questions to monitor change in communities;
• Promote gender equality and women’s voice as a core approach in all programmes to support the gender equality essential for women to achieve their full potential;
• Invest in information communication technologies and in addressing women’s illiteracy;
• Address drivers of vulnerability and gender inequality such as poor access to health services and to reproductive and sexual health information to remove barriers to successful resilience actions;
• Strengthen women’s voices in humanitarian response; and
• Increase institutional understanding and capacity on gender equality and women’s voice among government and donor agencies.