Our blog is officially online! Just in time for the commemoration of International Women’s day. But as a GDN member said, which I fully agree, everyday should be a celebration of women’s rights.

A recent visit to Mozambique provided photos of women carrying watermelons, water jugs, and other odds and ends on their heads. The absence of men was particularly striking. Female headed households (FHHs) in Mozambique comprise 22% of rural households and earns an average of $145 annually. Drought, floods, low-input agriculture, high marketing costs and land tenure insecurity contribute to a high level of food insecurity especially among FHHs. (ACDI/VOCA, 2008)

Although we have been observing this important day since the 1900s,  women still continue to battle for their rights to be recognised a century later. Not undermining the significant achievements of the last century, which brought us the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1979), the Vienna Declaration (1993), the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993), the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) and its amendments,  the United Nations Security Council Resoultion 1325 (UNSCR, 2000) and recently the UNSCR 1820 (2008), among others, we have yet to see gender equality and women’s rights fully recognised in the climate process and in policies on drr.

I mentioned these two in particualr to bring to attention two significant events this year where gender and women’s networks could take their advocacy further and influence the outcomes of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) and  the Global Platform on Disater Reduction.

During the first session of the Global Platform in 2007,  the GDN called for the prioritisation of gender within the HFA to:

1. Ensure that disaster risk reduction is a national and local priority which explicitly recognizes gender as a cross-cutting concern requiring attention throughout response, recovery, rehabilitation, preparedness and mitigation phases of disaster reduction planning;

2. Identify, assess and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning, recognizing that the daily routines and social conditions of women and men, girls and boys place them differently at risk, and engage them in different networks of communication;

3. Use knowledge, innovation and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels and for all members of nations and communities, based on a solid knowledge base of gender-disaggregated data, tools and information;

4. Reduce the underlying risk factors which result in differential levels and occasions of vulnerability and endangerment, and shape the capacities and resources of women and men to minimise harm; and finally,

5. Strengthen disaster preparedness for effective response at all levels by promoting the inclusion of women in disaster-related professions where they are underrepresented, and actively engaging with grassroots women’s groups - scaling up their effective solutions through partnerships - to enhance resilience in families and communities.

Download the GDN Oral Statement here.

During the second session of the Global Platform this year, a Global Assessment Report on DRR will be presented, which would review, among others the implementation of the HFA. A parallel assessment looking at the promises of HFA is being done by the Global Network for Disaster Reduction, involving stakeholders who are ‘most impacted by disasters.’ It would be interesting to compare the resulting documents from these two separate reviews.

In closing, I would like to invite members of the Network to use this blog as a medium to share their thoughts on issues surrounding gender and drr.  It could be a commentary, a photo, a poem or a video. It could be formal or informal writing and  writers could choose to remain anonymous. We have to agree on one thing though, that pieces written here do not necessarily reflect the Network’s view and remain the sole responsibility of the author/s.

Welcome to the GDN blog and happy women’s day!