Gender matters: Lessons for disaster risk reduction in South Asia
This report draws attention to gender as an indicator of vulnerability and discusses how women are disproportionately affected, particularly in the field of disaster preparedness and management (DP/M). It is divided into six sections.
The report commences by introducing the subject and how the research was carried out. It discusses why gender analysis is essential in the field of DP/M, and continues in the second section to examine the gendered contexts of risk and vulnerability and the many dimensions from which they should be approached: economic, social,educational, cultural, physical, organizational, motivational, and political.
The third section examines lessons from the field and how physiological vulnerabilities, sociocultural and economic marginalization, and gender stereotyping effect whether an individual is killed or manages to survive.
The following section discusses that one approach to DP/M is developing community resilience and making women part of the solution. A gender perspective can help to make this possible by increasing understanding of how women can become keys to hazard prevention within the community and natural disasters can actually be built upon as opportunities for social change.
The fifth section examines how gender analysis in disaster preparedness and management can reveal how a community works and the various roles and structures followed by men and women within it. It then discusses what gender-sensitive outreach looks like and how to use it.
The sixth section concludes the report by summarizing the discussions put forward and the challenges and opportunities for gender mainstreaming. It makes recommendations based on seven essential steps for imparting gender-sensitive disaster preparedness and management (DP/M).