CHAPTER SIX

Gender

Promoting Equality in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Settings

Hazel Malapit and Lynn Brown

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Prioritizing policies that support women and their empowerment before and during crises is essential to reducing harm from food system shocks

The treatment of women is a better predictor of a state’s peacefulness than its level of wealth, status of democracy, or ethnoreligious identity. In fragile and conflict-affected settings, women and girls face disproportionate risks that include forced displacement and gender-based violence.
Comprehensive and systematic data to provide evidence on the gendered consequences of crises are still lacking, particularly for disasters and conflicts. Yet, sex- and age-disaggregated data are critical to understanding how crises differentially affect women and men, and girls and boys; monitoring whether programs are reaching and benefiting the appropriate groups; and designing gender-responsive interventions.
Women’s voices are rarely heard in disaster management, despite evidence that their participation can improve outcomes, including in conflict situations. Although women are often consulted during the needs assessment phase of response management, they are not involved in the design of projects.

To improve the outcomes of crisis responses, it is important to:

Prioritize gender targets and track progress, and direct funding toward programming that promotes gender equality and women’s empowerment in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
Adopt innovative methods to address the gender data gap. Providing mobile phone access to women can have multiplier effects, enabling women to receive cash transfers directly while providing a platform for high-frequency data collection and targeted information campaigns.
Generate more evidence on violence prevention strategies. To date, few studies empirically evaluate the impact of violence prevention and response interventions in fragile and conflict-affected settings, but important research is underway, including work by the interdisciplinary Cash Transfer and Intimate Partner Violence Research Collaborative, hosted by IFPRI.
Ensure that women’s voices are included at all levels, especially in peace processes and in senior management and high-level government positions where policymaking and programming decisions are made.