Gender plays the role of a central organizing principle in every Pakistani community. Gender and the social constructs around it shape individual and collective life experiences just as decisively as age, social class, religious affiliation, disability or skill. And so, just as gender plays a key role in defining life experiences in times of calm, it also comes into play during times of disaster.
Despite this critical and rather obvious dynamic, gender remains a glaring missing link in our country’s disaster management considerations. May it be the absence of female first responders during the rescue phase, disregard for specific safety needs for women in camp colonies or the lack of focus on rehabilitating women and girls while building back better, there is a lot that Pakistan needs to do to creating disaster resilience in its female population.
Such disaster resilience, among other things, requires an in-depth understanding of and empathy for the issues that limit women and girls’ ability to protect themselves against the alleviated threat of abuse, exploitation and violence during emergencies. Beyond food and warmth, this understanding is important to cater to other critical needs such as health, psycho-social support, education, and revival of livelihood activities that are important to protect women and girls from violence in the short-run and make them resilient to future shocks.
There is nothing particularly layered or complicated in this phenomenon. In fact, this forms the very basis of any disaster management work. The only submission that needs attention is that rather than devising a one-size-fits all solution, disaster managers in Pakistan need to adopt the oft advised gender lens.
Let’s take the case of education to illustrate how a gender lens can support disaster management efforts and help Pakistan prepare better to meet emergencies in the future.
From the data that has so far emerged, we know that over 22,000 schools have been partially or fully damaged and that more than 3.5 million students have been displaced. Based on historical knowledge about education indicators, we also know that the majority of the 22.8 million out-of-school children in Pakistan are girls and any emergency situation inevitably has a fall-out on the prospects of girls continuing their education more than boys. Keeping this evidence before us, it should then be the priority of the disaster managers to ensure that this fresh calamity does not add to the already colossal number of out-of-school girls Pakistan had been struggling to send to schools. This is of course important on its own but is also critical to strengthening Pakistan by ensuring that yet another sizable chunk of its population is not left unskilled, unempowered.
Embedding a gender-responsive approach in managing education in times of disasters would also automatically help divert the attention of the decisionmakers towards steps that need to be taken to prioritize girls’ return back to formal schools as the disaster management cycle transitions into the rebuilding phase. This would mean allocating budgets for the reconstruction of girls’ schools at par with boys’ schools, introducing specific schemes to encourage parents impacted by calamity and poverty to continue their daughters’ education and diverting a portion of the available resources to normalize alternate, digital learning solutions for girls.
Where the government might lack capacity, there is immense value in learning from civil society organizations such as Awaz – Center for Development Services and consortiums like the Education Champions Network that have expertise in both gender and education programming and are well-versed in managing these issues during emergencies.
The recent floods are a stark reminder that Pakistan cannot rise above future challenges without providing its women and girls equitable support and a level playing field to prosper.
The writer is Executive Director of Pakistan Youth Change Advocates (PYCA). She can be reached at areebah.shahid@pyca.org.pk.