Gender Equality at the Forefront of Save the Children’s Hurricane Matthew Response

In October, I was deployed to Haiti to be part of Save the Children’s Hurricane Matthew Response. My specific focus was integrating gender equality into our emergency response, which is a crucial activity in an emergency response because it is often overlooked by humanitarian actors. Women, girls, boys and men all have different needs and vulnerabilities, as well as strengths, in all contexts. In emergencies, everything changes due to the stress and trauma of the crisis, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the destruction of infrastructure. The Haiti context is no different.

After travelling to the capital, Port au Prince, and speaking with the team coordinating the response, I travelled to the field office in Camp Perrin, which is anywhere from 4-6 hours away depending on traffic. On the way to the affected areas, I was struck by the devastation.

I had never seen so many trees uprooted and snapped off half way up like pencils, or completely stripped of the leaves from the force of the storm. We drove past flooded fields which reminded me that 100% of crops had been destroyed in some areas; this statistic became visceral when I saw the flooded fields and saw no vegetables in the road side markets. One section of the road had washed away causing a very long traffic jam as each vehicle going both directions had to gingerly pass through a narrow section where the water flowed through.

When I arrived in Camp Perrin, the response was in full swing, with teams being set up and expanding to provide water, sanitation and hygiene, health, nutrition, shelter, education, and food services to affected people. I joined teams visiting remote communities to speak about their needs, to distribute tarps, and to provide mobile health clinics. Pregnant women have unique needs in this context and the scale is large: close to 14,000 women and girls were expected to give birth between 25 October and 25 January. [1] This includes adolescent girls, who face much higher health risks, as pregnancy and pregnancy related complications are the second leading cause of death for girls 15-19 worldwide. [2]

One community in particular inspired me. In order to access the community, we drove about an hour outside of Camp Perrin, and then walked for an hour up into the hills as the area is only accessible by foot. We knocked on every door in the community to register everyone to receive a tarp to repair their rooves that had blown away in the storm. We were met with smiling faces from children and adults alike despite having spent weeks sleeping in a house with no roof.

Another thing that struck me was how schools were being used as communal shelters. Children at this point had already been out of school for weeks, and the effects were noticeable. Children were lacking the structure and safety they crave in school environments since the physical structures are being occupied by community members. Many teachers had fled, were injured or worse, killed, in the hurricane. I saw children who were noticeably traumatized by the hurricane, unable to eat a proper meal due to both lack of food and lack of appetite likely brought on by the trauma. Education is a critical service for all children as it has many protective characteristics. Many adolescent boys were taking to the streets and setting up road blocks in efforts to collect money and food, or are supported by political groups in advance of the election on 20 November. These actions can set boys on a dangerous path of risky behaviours like substance abuse and normalised violence.

There are hundreds of people divided up and sheltering in the school classrooms. Many community members had moved to the schools, so the demographics of people living in them were vastly varied. There were women with newborns in the classrooms, having given birth right there, without proper healthcare facilities. There were men, adolescent girls, seniors, and people with disabilities. Often there were not proper washrooms due to both poor infrastructure and overuse, which makes these shelters a prime area for diseases such as cholera to take root. Having these varied demographics crammed into small spaces together with no privacy can pose serious risks of sexual and gender-based violence, against primarily women and girls. These realities highlight the importance of tailoring our response to the unique needs of women, girls, boys and men, something that is not always prioritized in emergency contexts, even though many of the same issues always increase: rates of gender-based and domestic violence; transactional sex as a coping mechanism to meet basic needs; and risky behaviours such as harmful work and substance abuse. Indeed in the first few weeks of October, reports of sexual violence were increasing. In our response, we worked on preventing and mitigating the effects of these harmful realities that many are faced with. We set up support for survivors of violence, educating communities and staff about the manifestations of violence and the support available, and targeted additional support to at-risk groups such as female headed households.

As I left Haiti, things were improving and the emergency response was well underway. People were starting to rebuild their lives, but there remained massive gaps to fill before things returned to normal, which will take several years in the best case scenario. The international fundraising appeal is drastically underfunded, which means people in Haiti will have to dig deeper and be even more resilient in rebuilding their lives. With climate change making severe environmental events increasingly likely, building back better is a race against time before the next major storm hits the women, girls, boys and men of Haiti.

[1] http://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/haiti-hurricane-matthew-situation-report-no-15-24-october-2016

[2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs364/en/