Gender inclusive disaster risk financing

This research was commissioned to analyse the issues and additional considerations around gender in Disaster Risk Financing (DRF) programming, particularly how gender issues might differ across different hazard types (eg. fast vs. slow onset) and geographic contexts, and the approaches we can take to account for them. Making programming most effective includes ensuring that the DRF systems that we build or support are fully gender-sensitive and adequately account for gender differences at different points of the project cycle.

The study finds that three components of the DRF system contemplated for this study - risk analytics, contingency planning and financing - have important gendered aspects whose specific characteristics will depend on the hazard and the context. The key difference observed between the case studies is that the nature of the hazard impacts on the gender dimensions, which is why it is important to conduct a gender analysis per country and per hazard. For example, riverbank erosion in Bangladesh is location-specific meaning that the people who live there are physically tied to their vulnerability - they’re vulnerable because of where they live, and they live there because they’re vulnerable. This points to a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, inequality and disaster vulnerability. As for the case of cyclones in the Philippines, perhaps the bigger issue is risk knowledge because people may be newly or differently affected by the less location-specific hazard. Here, differential access to risk information could be key in supporting people to understand possible risk and take early action.