UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.
UN Women’s humanitarian engagement is guided by its triple mandate: normative, coordination, and operations. As a core member of Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) Gender Reference Group, UN Women hosts the Gender Desk which monitors the IASC’s adherence to its Gender Policy. At regional and country levels, UN Women leads the coordination of Gender in Humanitarian Action Working Groups (GiHA WGs) linked to the Humanitarian Country Teams (HCTs) which serve as the main coordination platforms for advancing gender mainstreaming. In 2020, UN Women contributed to humanitarian and refugee coordination mechanisms in 47 country and regional contexts as members of the HCTs and leads of GiHA WGs. Through its humanitarian programmes, UN Women improved the lives of over 570,000 women, girls and their families in crisis settings by creating empowerment hubs for them to access cash-for-work, services, protection, and support.
The Pakistan floods have creating a humanitarian crisis within existing humanitarian crises, requiring urgent and comprehensive humanitarian response. Climate change continues to disrupt lives and create severe weather events that further exacerbate the conditions on the ground. As floods continued with roads and bridges washed away, humanitarian access to affected communities is affected, further marginalizing vulnerable groups and restricting their access to lifesaving support. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by this crisis, rendering them further vulnerable and reversing gender equality gains made over the past decades. These could have been largely reduced if disaster risk reduction measures had been incorporated into physical, social and economic development.
In the recent flood of 2022, UN Women played a key role in coordinating the Gender, Social Sustainability, and Inclusion cross-cutting sector, as well as supporting the Human Impact Assessment, and providing technical backstopping on numerous additional sectors to ensure a comprehensive and robust gender analysis is included to inform response and recovery efforts in Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA). UN Women, through its role as the Gender Theme Group co-chair, is working with UNFPA, along with UNHCR, WFP, WHO and UNICEF, to conduct a Rapid Gender Analysis, to provide a further comprehensive picture of the needs of the most marginalized groups, including women and girls.
UN Women Pakistan will be implementing the Project titled Women’s Empowerment for Economic Resilience and Disaster Risk Reduction in Pakistan under its Japan Supplementary Budget (JSB) for the year 2023. UN Women’s support is specifically targeting women and girls in the most affected districts through innovative and sustainable approaches in the form of in-kind support for, health and psycho-social support to women and protection for women in girls in the camps and hosting communities. The support will cater to, protection, needs of the targeted communities for residual needs and recovery. The project will adopt a gender transformative approach towards increased engagement of men and boys towards supporting women in all the initiatives proposed under the current project.
Also, effort will be made to develop linkage between activities underscoring humanitarian–development nexus because this increasingly brings forward a solution to humanitarian concerns and allows to manage disasters to rehabilitation. Humanitarian assistance can only be fully effective if it is gender-sensitive and also responds to the development needs of the population.
Reporting to the Deputy Country Representative with guidance from the Portfolio Manager, Women’s Economic Empowerment, the Programme Specialist exercises overall responsibility for planning, implementing, and managing UN Women interventions relating to Humanitarian and Disaster Risk Reduction. The Programme Specialist works in close collaboration with the Women’s Economic Empowerment, Ending Violent against Women and Operations teams at PCO, UN Women Regional Office and HQ staff, Government officials, multi and bi-lateral donors and civil society ensuring successful UN Women programme implementation under portfolio.