Gender-based violence is a pervasive protection and human rights issue that is often exacerbated during and after humanitarian emergencies. While the existence of gender-based violence may be extremely difficult to document in any given emergency, research has shown that incidences of gender-based violence are under-reported and occur regardless of the presence or absence of evidence.
Action Against Hunger acknowledges that gender-based violence is both a cause and consequence of hunger and we have a responsibility to ensure we mitigate and prevent gender-based violence in the work that we do and across all of our offices.
Over the past two years we have explored ways to enhance the accountability with humanitarian nutrition organizations towards gender-based violence through a pilot project funded by the United States government’s Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM).
In this two year pilot project, we:
Standardized: We provided support to Action Against Hunger offices to help them achieve the Gender Minimum Standards. This includes conducting gender analyses to understand the specific needs, capacities, and vulnerabilities of all people in the communities we work, including risks of gender-based violence.
Built knowledge and capacity: To improve accountability, we trained humanitarian nutrition actors (our staff and our nutrition partners) to integrate gender-based violence considerations in nutrition programs. Over two years we trained 1,602 people (638 women and 964 men), coming from 143 different organizations and 32 countries.
Made it practical: Following the Inter-Agency Standing Committee guidelines on gender-based violence, we adapted our tools and those of the Global Nutrition Cluster to integrate gender-based violence considerations. This includes, for example, reviewing questionnaires used by teams when assessing needs in a community to include specific questions to better understand the risks of gender-based violence in a community. By ensuring international guidelines integrated into tools used by our teams regularly, we systematically mitigate and prevent risks of gender-based violence in our work.
To learn more about the achievements and lessons learned of this pilot project, reach out to Action Against Hunger’s Gender Unit (genderunit@actioncontrelafaim.ca).