Op-ed: Gender equality can save women’s lives in disasters
May 9, 2017
By Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka,UN Under-Secretary-General and the Executive Director of UN Women, and Robert Glasser, UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction and head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Women in the western Haitian town of Les Cayes collect food and emergency supplies in the wake of Hurricane Matthew, which struck the Caribbean nation in October 2016. Photo: UN Photo/Logan Abassi
Later this month, the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) will take place in Mexico. This meeting provides an important opportunity to reboot global progress on embedding gender equality in disaster risk management and to redress deadly exclusion.
Even though the quality of disaggregated data needs to be improved, research shows that women and girls die in much greater numbers in extreme disaster events. The inclusion of women’s perspectives and leadership is a necessary recognition both of the greater risks women experience and their unique roles in resilience building, disaster response and recovery.
Precisely for this reason, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, which UN Member States adopted two years ago to reduce global disaster losses, emphasizes that a gender perspective should be integrated into all policies and practices. Progress on this aspect will be key in the monitoring of the Sendai Framework’s implementation.
