Women Led Action for Gender-Inclusive and Rights-Based Disaster Risk Reduction

The focus for this session will be on the localisation of gender-responsive action in Disaster Risk Reduction. The climate emergency is impacting women, men and all gender differently. During disasters, which are increasing in frequency and intensity, women and girls are more severely impacted. Experiences of forced marriage, sexual violence, and poverty, shape gendered experiences of disasters and displacement. Women are often dependent on the essential resources from their immediate environment, and face intersecting vulnerabilities. In times of emergency, when environments rapidly change, their access to resources is further restricted.

As members of ACT Alliance, we work with a gender-inclusive rights-based perspective, together with the women groups at grassroots level, to achieve:
• Gender-balance in participation, decision-making, and representation in community level activities for disaster and climate change impact mitigation as well as adaptation.
• Gender equality through gender mainstreaming in the disaster preparedness community financing programme design. We work towards achieving economic justice, through livelihood activities and provision of community resilience fund managed by the women groups.
• Skill share and knowledge transfer on the gender justice principles to all stakeholders of the communities we work with through dialogues and capacity building session.
• Community-based protection from gender-based violence mechanism.

The session will present the best practices of women-led approaches in the decision-making process for resilience actions, by showcasing examples of conducting risk mapping, identifying their vulnerabilities and capacity to decide the resilience actions:
• Building community’s self-reliance on local food supplies such as through urban community garden (vegetables and herbs) and food product processing and potential while lessening the dependency on outside parties during crisis. The women groups consider economic resilience activities will improve their leverage with the decision maker in their community, including how to create women friendly neighborhoods especially in urban context.
• Support the livelihood to generate income for the groups.
• Improving the recognition, roles and contributions of people with disabilities and women, through demonstrating initiatives and commitment for resilience actions.
• Strengthen social cohesiveness through managing local resources inclusively and prioritising the needs of women and people with disability.
• Build a network between grassroots groups for exchange learning and joint advocacy.