Addressing the Specific and Heightened Risks Faced by Women and Girls in Crises

Written by Rebecca Holmes (Consultant on social protection, gender and inclusion, STAAR), Charlotte Maugham (Knowledge Management and Learning Lead, STAAR), Silke Staab (Research Specialist, UN Women), and Constanza Tabbush (Research Specialist, UN Women) on behalf of the SPIAC-B Gender Working Group

In recent years, the world has been rocked by repeated shocks – from the COVID-19 pandemic to the current food, fuel, and financial crisis. Violent conflict is a reality for two billion people, while climate-related disasters continue to increase. These shocks overlap with and intensify underlying structural crises in jobs and livelihoods, care and the environment (UN Women, 2021). The effects of these compound crises are reversing progress on poverty eradication and undermining the gains that have been made in gender equality.  UN Women’s 2023 snapshot of gender equality progress has found that:

• Women and girls in extremely fragile contexts are 7.7 times more likely to live in households under the $2.15 line than those in non-fragile contexts. 
• Under a worst-case climate scenario, up to 158.3 million more women and girls could be pushed into poverty by mid-century, exceeding the number of men and boys by 16 million (UN Women and UNDP, 2022).

Drawing on good practice and research examples, including from STAAR and UN Women, this blog explores the potential of strong social protection systems to advance gender equality in crisis contexts.

The impacts of crises are never gender neutral…

When crises strike, gender inequalities – driven by discriminatory gender and social norms – are exacerbated. In practice, this means women and girls face unequal access to resources and decision-making processes. And often bear the brunt of households’ negative coping strategies.

Sources: IIED,  UNESCO and Vu et al. (2018)

…And yet responses often side-line women’s needs and rights

In times of crisis, decision makers close ranks – collaborative design processes involving diverse stakeholders are often sacrificed for the sake of urgency, with the needs of some groups prioritised over others (UN Women and UNDP, 2022).

• Only 10% of women across 36 countries reported receiving emergency cash relief compared to 16% of men in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic (UN Women and UNDP, 2022).
• Only one in five global social protection measures during COVID-19 addressed specific gender inequalities, such as supporting women in informal employment, and confronting the unequal distribution of care work UN Women and UNDP, 2022; Gavrilovic et al., 2022).
• A 2015 review of cash-for-work programmes in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp meanwhile revealed, that 76% of work opportunities were taken up by men (UN Women, 2026).

Social protection can help households build resilience in advance of a crisis and play a critical role in delivering support to people affected – including women and girls

Well-designed and implemented social protection that is informed by an understanding of the specific risks that women and girls face in a crisis, has real potential to increase their resilience to shocks.  Evidence shows that countries with more robust, gender-responsive social protection systems were better able to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigate its negative impact on women and girls (UN Women and UNDP, 2022). A combination of long-term investments in social protection system building and short-term adaptations in response to shocks can contribute to:

• Addressing women’s poverty through social assistance (protection);
• Strengthening women’s resilience and ability to cope with shocks, including through social insurance and livelihood diversification (prevention);
• Providing women with sustainable pathways out of poverty, including through stronger integration of social protection, public services and labour market interventions (promotion); and
• Addressing structural drivers of poverty, inequality and marginalization, including gender-based violence, women’s lesser control over economic resource and their disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work (transformation).

Sources: Perera et al. (2020), Presler-Marshall et al. (2019) and Holmes (2021)

While still nascent, some promising examples of gender-responsive social protection in crisis settings are starting to emerge…

Published every five years, UN Women’s forthcoming World Survey on the Role of Women in Development (2024) will focus on “Harnessing social protection for gender equality, resilience and transformation”. The report will explore how integrated gender-responsive social protection systems can advance gender equality in the context of more frequent disasters and chronic crises, including for groups facing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. This major stocktake of what works will provide guidance for policymakers and support advocacy for a new generation of gender-responsive social protection systems.

In the meantime, we’ve rounded up some practical steps and good practice examples which can also be found in STAAR’s Gender-transformative social protection in crisis contexts: guidance note:

1. Understand the context from a gender lens

In Northern Senegal, a survey carried out by UN Women highlighted that much of women’s time is devoted to caring for members of households who become ill as a result of adverse conditions -especially in the context of climate shocks. This results in women having less time to work their land and build economic resilience. Since 2021, UN Women has worked with local, regional, and national government partners, the private sector, and women’s organisations to develop the “Transformative approaches for recognising, reducing, and redistributing (3R) unpaid care work in women’s economic empowerment” programme, funded by the Government of Canada. Through this work, Senegal’s National Health Insurance Agency has allowed the adaptation of services to meet the needs of rural women, enabling them to access an insurance system to mitigate the risk of income loss due to illness in the household. Through awareness raising and capacity building, more than 1000 rural women members of a farmers’ network have enrolled in national health insurance for the first time, accessing coverage for themselves and their households – reaching nearly 7,000 people.

2. Consider the specific needs of women and girls when expanding and adapting existing systems for crisis response

As set out in STAAR’s Gender-transformative social protection in crisis contexts: guidance note, it is critical to consider gender when adapting the coverage, adequacy and comprehensiveness of social protection in crisis settings. This includes considerations of women’s disproportionate care responsibilities and increased risks of violence. Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic include:

• Horizontal expansion: when extending coverage to new groups, careful consideration must be given to demographic and/or occupational groups where women are overrepresented and may be particularly affected by the emergency, such as female-headed households or informal workers. For instance, initial gender vulnerability assessments during the Covid-19 outbreak revealed that domestic workers’ jobs and earnings were severely affected, with little or no recurse to social protection. Consequently, several countries, including Bangladesh and Argentina explicitly targeted domestic workers in emergency assistance. Prioritizing women as recipients of household-level emergency relief, in turn, can channel resources to women in male-headed households.
• Vertical expansion: when selecting programmes for benefit top-ups to absorb shocks, it is crucial to assess the gender composition of the beneficiary pool to ensure that women are not inadvertently side-lined. In addition, vertical expansions can be deployed to address gender-specific needs. During the pandemic, some measures that provided additional benefits to both sexes, such as Togo’s Novissi programme for informal workers, offered extra benefits to women in recognition of the double role they played as income providers and caregivers.

3. Strengthen institutional capacities in designing and delivering inclusive social protection in crises

Since March 2022, UN Women and WFP have made real progress in mainstreaming gender and social inclusion within Lebanon’s National Poverty Targeting Programme. Targeted investment in capacity development has been critical to the success of this effort. STAAR – through FCDO funding – embedded two advisers within UN Women to spearhead GESI integration including delivering training to over 550 programme staff. This training covered a variety of topics including gender equality, social inclusion, GBV and referral pathways. STAAR and UN Women continue to work closely together with plans in place for similar collaboration in Cote D’Ivoire and UN Women’s East and Southern Africa Regional Office.  

4. Work closely with women’s organisations in the design and delivery of social protection to address access barriers and ensure insurance schemes respond to women’s needs

The Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock), in partnership with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), and Blue Marble, have created the Extreme Heat Income Insurance, a new, parametric insurance to help women in India recover wages lost due to climate-driven extreme heat events. In India’s informal sector, women work for prolonged periods of time in dangerously hot conditions which leads to preventable pain and suffering and illnesses, ranging from lingering rashes to chronic heart and kidney disease. The Extreme Heat Income Insurance aims to ensure that these women do not have to risk their health while supporting their families’ financial security. Innovation and partnerships between development actors in the context of climate-related shocks can pave the way for new instruments to better and more specifically mitigate the economic and health risks faced by women and girls.

In Mali, OKO, a for profit African startup that provides crop insurance for smallholder farmers to strengthen their resilience to disasters, chose the crops to cover based on their popularity in Mali, with no focus on gender, but the approach led to a massive gender imbalance in the customer base. They conducted a survey which identified what crops are mostly grown by women. OKO proposed to create a new insurance product for peanut growers. OKO also noticed that the female team members were selling to a larger proportion of female farmers, so it created a team of female-only agents. The women only team registered 3.2 times more women than the male-only or mixed team. It shows how robust gender analysis and design improved the inclusion and protection of women farmers. An insurance instrument was designed to meet their specific realities: sold by women agents, covering women’s main crop in the region, and supported with relevant financial literacy accessible to them.

UNICEF has recently engaged partners – including STAAR – in a series of consultations with feminist, women and girl-led organisations aimed at exploring the lived experiences of women, girls, and traditionally excluded gender groups with the design and implementation of social protection. Outcomes will be presented and discussed at CSW this month. STAAR is also about to kick off a study into the role of local actors, including women’s rights organisations, in supporting social protection and strengthening gender equality – with the aim of developing clear recommendations for enhancing this role in five focus countries.  

5. Provide complementary programming to respond to women and girls’ needs

The Government of Niger's cash transfer programme helps respond to climate-related shocks. An experimental intervention was supported by the World Bank to complement the cash transfer including financial inclusion, basic micro-entrepreneurship skills, market access to beneficiaries, and a transfer for productive investments, mostly to women. The most transformative element provided psychosocial interventions that aimed to strengthen aspirations and interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, as well as to address gender and social norms through life skills training.

In Norte de Santander, Colombia, the Women’s Refugee Council and partners sought to explore changes among forced migrant, refugee, and host national GBV survivors in a cash-integrated GBV case management program. Caseworkers assess participants’ need for cash assistance for protection, examining the economic drivers of their exposure to GBV risks, as well as the financial barriers to their recovery. As part of GBV case management, caseworkers provided psychological counselling, information on and coordination of group workshops, and legal service. Caseworkers also activated referrals to external services.

Additional resources

Check out the following links for a deeper dive into gender-responsive social protection in crisis:

Webinars

• How can social protection respond to the risks, vulnerabilities and opportunities of women and girls in crises?
• Social Protection for Prevention of and Response to Gender-Based Violence (GBV)

Blogs

• How can we better support women and girls during crises? Realising the potential of gender-transformative social protection
• Women emerging from crises: Lebanon’s gender-responsive social safety net programme

Guidance, reports and policy briefs

• Gender-transformative social protection in crisis contexts: guidance note
• UN Women and UNDP report: Government responses to COVID-19: Lessons on gender equality for a world in turmoil
• UN Women & UNICEF Innocenti paper: Mainstreaming gender into social protection strategies and programmes Evidence from 74 low- and middle-income countries
• UN Women Policy Brief: Addressing violence against women through social protection: A review of the evidence (2023)
• UN Women Policy Brief: Putting gender equality at the centre of social protection strategies in sub-Saharan Africa: How far have we come? (2021)

For regular updates on and outputs from STAAR’s work on gender-responsive social protection follow STAAR Facility on LinkedIn

References

Gavrilovic, M., Rubio, M., Bastagli, F., Hinton, R., Staab, S., Goulder, R. G., ... & Tabbush, C. (2022). Gender-responsive social protection post–COVID-19. Science, 375(6585), 1111-1113.

UN Women (2016). Restoring Dignity and Building Resilience: Monitoring Report on UN Women’s Programming in Za’atari Refugee Camp. Monitoring report on UN Women’s Programming in Za’atari Refugee Camp: June–October 2015. Amman: UN Women.

UN Women (2021). Beyond COVID-19: A Feminist Plan for Sustainability and social Justice. New York: UN Women.

UN Women and UNDP (2022). Government Responses to COVID-19: Lessons on Gender Equality for a World in Turmoil. New York: UN Women.