Episode Details

A Mother's Day Message

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers in the world. Our team wants you to know that we appreciate you. So when I was looking for a topic for this week, I felt that it was essential to address how disasters worldwide impact women. 

Asako Okai, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP Crisis Bureau, stated in her piece, "Women are hit hardest in disasters, so why are responses too often gender-blind?" Women and children are 14 times more likely than men to die in a disaster. 

As noted In the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 70 percent of the people that died were women. 

So How Do Disasters Impact Women Differently? 

New projections of global poverty by UN Women, UNDP, and the Pardee Center for International Futures estimate that, globally, 388 million women and girls will be living in extreme poverty in 2022 (compared to 372 million men and boys). But the outlook could be far worse. In a "high-damage" scenario, this number could balloon to 446 million (427 million for men and boys). This is a fundamental factor leading to higher mortality rates when compared to men during a disaster. 

Because women are statistically poorer, they have far limited available financial resources, such as resilient housing. Women typically have limited financial safety nets and often less education to seek employment to rectify their collective situations. These social vulnerabilities explode during and after a disaster, ensuring a cycle of poverty that can become generational.

Why Water Matters? 

In last week's Weekly Round-Up, we shared an article from the Crisis Response Journal on Africa's water security. We chose this piece because of its implications on climate migration. However, in many parts of the world, lack of access to clean water and poverty go hand in hand with women facing hazards. The female populations of developing nations are more likely to be responsible for retrieving water for their family. Water scarcity forces women to walk further from the safety of their homes to collect water, making them increasingly susceptible to sexual assault and rape. In Bangladesh, which is considered the epicenter of climate change, the World Health Organization has estimated that in 8 out of 10 homes, women are exposed to the risk of harassment, sexual assault, and rape when collecting water.   

Women's Health Care and Disasters 

One of the significant issues facing women worldwide is they are susceptible to poor health outcomes, violence, and inequalities in all stages of a disaster. In developing countries, women have less access to education, including basic survival skills such as swim safety. The lack of training reduces their ability to flee in rising floodwaters, for example. In these nations, Women traditionally are homebound, caring for their family members. They do not have access to the early warning systems, reducing their disaster preparedness and response times and increasing their chances of death. That is one of the significant factors explaining why 90 percent of the 140,000 people who died during the 1991 Bangladesh cyclone were female.

At any disaster, women have a statistically higher instance of forced marriage. They are exposed to sexual violence and can be required to engage in transactional sex for financial coping strategies. For example, after the 2004 tsunami in India, nine out of ten women affected by the disaster had experienced sexual violence within two years of the incident. 

The impacts of disasters on women are not only in developing nations. After the 2011 Christchurch earth