UNIFEM Responds to the Tsunami Tragedy

Creating Policy Space – Bringing Women's Perspectives to Decision Makers

To amplify women's voices to influence recovery policies and agendas, UNIFEM is building the capacity and leadership of women's organizations to advocate for the promotion of women's rights in all reconstruction processes.

Gender advisors are in place in Aceh and Sri Lanka, advocating with government, UN Country Teams, and NGOs on women's most pressing needs and ensuring that their perspectives are part of mainstream efforts. UNIFEM is also working closely with local coordination agencies and task forces, such as the Aceh Bureau for Reconstruction and Rehabilitation (BRR), the Somali Aid Coordination Body Tsunami Task Force (SACB), and the Government Task Force on Tsunami Relief (TAFREN) in Sri Lanka to highlight women's leadership roles. Support is going to building the capacity of national women's machineries to form gender units or women's desks within government recovery processes to monitor the inclusion of women's perspectives in all decision-making [5]. Local women's groups are receiving support to build skills, organize, and conduct advocacy activities to make themselves heard at local and national policy-making levels. They are also being supported to mobilize women to participate in grassroots activities through forums and mobile discussions.

To ensure that efforts at the policy level are derived from and remain connected to what women are really prioritizing on the ground, major women's consultations were organized in May and June 2005 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and in Aceh, gathering hundreds of women to discuss their concerns and articulate their role in the recovery and rebuilding phase. Both meetings were the first time women from different affected districts and villages came together. Besides more immediate concerns about livelihoods, inheritance and property rights, and the creation of adequate settlements and housing, the issue put forward as most critical in the post-emergency phase, was the need for more opportunities for women to interact with local and national authorities, and participate in decision-making to engage with the reconstruction process.

Recommendations from the meetings were brought to the highest policy levels – during a visit in May, UNIFEM's executive director and South Asia regional programme director raised the issues with the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and UN Country Team ahead of a donor Development Forum, when it was discovered that women's perspectives were being marginalized in its planning process; in Aceh, after recommendations from the women's consultation were brought to the BRR, its chief promised to recognize and consult with the Aceh Women's Council (a body creating at the meeting to represent Acehnese women), and appointed UNIFEM as its gender advisor.

To address the paucity of sex-disaggregated data, UNIFEM is further developing the databanks created in the emergency period by continuing to collect detailed information on all local organisations working on gender issues, including informal and traditional groups. In both Aceh and Sri Lanka, surveys have been carried out in IDP shelters to obtain more first-hand data on women's situation – these will be made available in early 2006 [6]. In Somalia, UNIFEM is giving support to the women's ministry to collect gender-sensitive data.

Obtaining information on women in Somalia is especially tricky — the highly traditional communities often post male "gatekeepers" to monitor women's activities and meetings so that it is difficult for women to speak out. The post-tsunami UN interagency task force assessment contained no sex-disaggregated data for example, mainly because most of the field teams conducting interviews were male, and hence not allowed to speak to female-only groups without the presence of male gatekeepers, who prevented women from voicing their concerns. UNIFEM, through its field missions and local female partners, was able to obtain critical, accurate information from women directly (left), and feed this into reports and assessments to plug gaps and correct misconceptions.

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[5] National women's machineries include the Bureau of Women Empowerment in Aceh, the Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Social Welfare, and the National Committee of Women in Sri Lanka, and the Ministry of Women and Family Affairs of Pundtland, Somalia. A gender unit has already been set up in Aceh, while in Somalia, UNIFEM partner NGO WAWA (We are Women Activists) is lobbying for the creation of one within the SABC. In Sri Lanka, advocacy efforts are underway to urge the creation of an NGO Task Force to focus on women's issues.

[6] In Aceh, 6,497 women IDPs living in tents, temporary shelters and host communities were surveyed in 17 out of 21 districts. In Sri Lanka 53,361 households in 9 of 13 affected districts were surveyed.