Gender Equality in the 2015 Strategic Response Plan

Published Date

The report illustrates a growing recognition that gender equality is pivotal to humanitarian response. It is encouraging that concerted efforts are being made to ensure that humanitarian programming effectively addresses the distinct needs of women, girls, men and boys. For example, many operations identified specific protection and reproductive needs of girls and women along with programming strategies and activities to address these needs. Similarly, the review identified examples of disadvantages and discrimination against women and girls or men and boys, with associated activities aimed at mitigating negative practices.
Despite important progress, the review of the IASC Gender Marker codes indicated that only 35 per cent of proposals considered gender issues. The majority of projects were either gender blind (22%), or only partially designed to address the distinct needs of women, girls, boys and men (42%). In some operations, a generic approach to affected populations undermined programming effectiveness, specifically by failing to recognize distinct needs of different groups of people. Despite improvements in collection and analysis of sex and age disaggregated data; this remains inconsistent. Indeed, better analysis of the difference that gender and age has on roles, access to resources and vulnerabilities is central to strengthening humanitarian programming.

Some key recommendations for the planning process include:
· Continued improvement of quantitative and qualitative data collection, disaggregated by sex and age.
· Where gaps in sex and age disaggregated data are identified in the Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO), a plan is developed to address them in future assessments.
· Coherent and adapted activities with corresponding indicators to address assessed disadvantages and discrimination are developed.
· Closer attention is paid to the wider needs of women and girls and their role within society, such as in generating income or participating in community or project decisions.
· Building on the improved articulation of the needs of women and girls, a stronger focus is placed on vulnerabilities faced by men and boys to improve the wider gender understanding.