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	Women and girls left behind by UN Women, agencies   Mar. 2022   Celebrating the solution multipliers, by Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women   On International Women’s Day, we celebrate the power and potential of women and girls. We recognize their courage, resilience and leadership. We mark the ways in which we are making progress towards a more gender-equal world.   At the same time, we see how that progress is being undermined by multiple, interlocking and compounding generational crises.   Currently, we are witnessing the horrifying situation in Ukraine where the impacts on women and girls, including the hundreds of thousands displaced, remind us: all conflicts, from Ukraine to Myanmar to Afghanistan, from the Sahel to Yemen, exact their highest price from women and girls. The Secretary- General has been clear, War Must Stop.   Recently, we have seen the impact of COVID-19 in increasing inequalities, driving poverty and violence against women and girls; and rolling back their progress in employment, health and education. The accelerating crises of climate change and environmental degradation are disproportionately undermining the rights and wellbeing of women and girls. They are multiplying insecurity at all levels, from individual and household to national.   Rising temperatures, extended droughts, violent storms and floods are resulting in loss of livelihoods, they are depleting resources and fueling migration and displacement.   The latest major IPCC report on climate change, and our Secretary-General, have warned us that ‘nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone – now, ’and that ‘many ecosystems are at the point of no return – now’.   Climate change is a threat multiplier. But women, and especially young women, are solution multipliers.   We have today the opportunity to put women and girls at the centre of our planning and action and to integrate gender perspectives into global and national laws and policies. We have the opportunity to re-think, re-frame and re-allocate resources.   We have the opportunity to benefit from the leadership of women and girls environmental defenders and climate activists to guide our planet’s conservation. We need Indigenous women’s inter-generational knowledge, practices and skills.   It will take unprecedented levels of global cooperation and solidarity to succeed, but there is no alternative to success. We must protect our hard-won gains on human rights and women’s rights and lead decisively to leave no woman or girl behind.   We have a blueprint to follow. It involves women’s full and equal participation and leadership in decision-making; their access to green jobs and the blue economy; and their equal access to finance and resources.   We need to ensure universal social protection and a care economy that protects us all. We have to scale up financing for gender-responsive climate, environmental and disaster risk initiatives; including for COVID-19 recovery and to increase resilience to future shocks.   28 Feb. 2022   How gender inequality and climate change are interconnected   Gender inequality coupled with the climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges of our time. It poses threats to ways of life, livelihoods, health, safety and security for women and girls around the world.   Historically, climate change scientists, researchers and policymakers have struggled with how to make the vital connections between gender, social equity, and climate change.   As more and more data and research reveal their clear correlation, it’s time to talk about the disparate impacts of climate change and the linkages between women’s empowerment and effective, global climate action.   Women and girls experience the greatest impacts of climate change, which amplifies existing gender inequalities and poses unique threats to their livelihoods, health, and safety.   Across the world, women depend more on, yet have less access to, natural resources. In many regions, women bear a disproportionate responsibility for securing food, water, and fuel. Agriculture is the most important employment sector for women in low- and lower-middle income countries, during periods of drought and erratic rainfall, women, as agricultural workers and primary procurers, work harder to secure income and resources for their families. This puts added pressure on girls, who often have to leave school to help their mothers manage the increased burden.   Climate change is a “threat multiplier”, meaning it escalates social, political and economic tensions in fragile and conflict-affected settings. As climate change drives conflict across the world, women and girls face increased vulnerabilities to all forms of gender-based violence, including conflict-related sexual violence, human trafficking, child marriage, and other forms of violence.   When disasters strike, women are less likely to survive and more likely to be injured due to long standing gender inequalities that have created disparities in information, mobility, decision-making, and access to resources and training.   In the aftermath, women and girls are less able to access relief and assistance, further threatening their livelihoods, wellbeing and recovery, and creating a vicious cycle of vulnerability to future disasters.   Women’s and girls’ health is endangered by climate change and disasters by limiting access to services and health care, as well as increasing risks related to maternal and child health. Research indicates that extreme heat increases incidence of stillbirth, and climate change is increasing the spread of vector-borne illnesses such as malaria, dengue fever, and Zika virus, which are linked to worse maternal and neonatal outcomes.   http://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/statement/2022/03/celebrating-the-solution-multipliers http://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/feature-story/2022/02/five-ways-to-build-gender-equality-and-sustainability http://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/International-Womens-Day-2022.aspx http://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/news/2021/12/recognize-care-as-a-human-right-urge-leaders-of-the-global-alliance-for-care http://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/gender-lens-essential-addressing-linked-climate-change-and-security   http://plan-international.org/news/2022-02-28-ipcc-report-lays-bare-scale-climate-injustice http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/news-stories/news/international-womens-day-stories-msf-leaders-and-changemakers http://www.unfpa.org/news http://www.spotlightinitiative.org/news http://actionaid.org/publications/2021/womens-rights-water-and-sanitation-elements-joint-action-agenda http://washmatters.wateraid.org/blog/the-gendered-impacts-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-women-and-girls   Dec 2021   Women and girls left behind: Glaring gaps in pandemic responses   UN Women’s newest report reveals that women and girls have disproportionately suffered the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 – be it through lost jobs and reduced work hours, increased intensity of care and domestic work, and strains on their physical and mental health. And yet, the report also shows that women and girls are far less likely than men and boys to receive COVID-19 relief or social protection, from governments or NGOs.   Women and girls left behind: Glaring gaps in pandemic responses compiles and analyses the results of 45 Rapid Gender Assessment surveys (RGAs) on the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 produced by UN Women in partnership with national statistics offices, governmental entities and international partners. The RGAs include nearly 100,000 respondents across all regions surveyed from April 2020–March 2021.   In the economic sphere, the RGAs reveal uneven impacts by sex and age. Although job losses affected nearly a quarter of women and men, 29% of working-aged mothers living with children lost their jobs compared to only 20% of working-aged men living with children. Young women living with children were also hard-hit, with 56% seeing reduced paid work hours versus only 44% of young men living with children.   When it comes to care and domestic work, partnered women with children in the household were most likely to report increased domestic work (67% women versus 63% men) and childcare (70% women versus 65% men), and were more likely to report that the intensity of their work had increased (defined as time spent on three or more activities).   Women were also more likely to report strained physical and mental health, with younger women most affected – 71% of women aged 18–24 experienced mental and/or emotional stress, compared to 59% of young men. Widowed women living with children were also more likely than men in the same situation to report strained mental and emotional well-being (72% versus 68%).   The RGA data also confirm that relief and social protection schemes have fallen short of their potential. Women were significantly less likely to report receiving pandemic-related cash relief from governments (10% of women versus 16% of men). Single women living with children were particularly left behind, being less than half as likely as single men living with children to receive cash relief (12% of women versus 25% of men). Women without children (whether single, widowed or partnered) were also less likely to receive cash relief (8% women versus 17% of men).   When it comes to social protection, women were half as likely as men to report being covered by unemployment insurance (7% of women versus 14% of men) in 19 countries. In particular, single women with children were far less likely than their male counterparts to be covered by unemployment insurance (5% of women versus 16% of men) or to receive support from NGOs (8% of women versus 25% of men).   Single women without children were also far less likely than single men without children to be covered by unemployment insurance (8% of women versus 23% of men).   Notably, younger women (aged 18–24) were also less likely to report receiving cash relief (9% versus 21% of men), unemployment insurance (5% versus 18% of men) or support from NGOs (6% versus 7% of men).   These findings are particularly surprising given the data about how younger women, single moms and partnered women with children have been hardest hit by COVID-19. This suggests that many governments and NGOs have not been effectively targeting relief policies to reach those in the greatest need, despite compelling age- and sex-disaggregated data clearly illustrating impacts.   Gender-responsive policies matter   At the same time, RGA data reveal that in countries that did design policies to address women’s economic security during the pandemic, women were 1.6 times as likely to report receiving government relief than in countries without such policies. This was calculated using data from the UNDP-UN Women Gender Response Tracker, and controlling for job loss and socioeconomic circumstances prior to the pandemic.   Across 28 countries, women living in countries that adopted policy measures that directly support unpaid care during the pandemic were less likely to report increases in unpaid care and domestic work (82% in countries without such policies, compared to 78% in countries with policies).   Conversely, in countries without measures addressing women’s economic security or unpaid care, women were 1.3 times as likely to report negative impacts on their emotional and mental well-being as in countries that invoked such policies.   Also, women who reported receiving relief were less likely to report increased mental and emotional strain by 11 percentage points over those who did not receive relief.   The report concludes that relief and social protection responses effectively targeted to the needs of women and girls play a key role in mitigating the pandemic’s disproportionate adverse impacts on women. For policymaking to be more gender-responsive, decision-makers must both invest in and pay attention to gender data. And to build back better, governments and NGOs need evidence-driven policies and responses that leave no one behind.   http://reliefweb.int/report/world/women-and-girls-left-behind-glaring-gaps-pandemic-responses http://data.unwomen.org/ http://data.unwomen.org/features/poverty-deepens-women-and-girls-according-latest-projections Visit the related web page
	Women frontline healthcare workers and vaccine equity still key to addressing COVID by CARE International, agencies   Dec. 2021   For two years now, CARE and many others have been repeating: no one is safe until everyone is safe. Omicron proves—again—that this is the hard truth. New variants will continue to menace the globe if we keep failing to invest in last-mile vaccine delivery.   Getting to 70% means immediate significant investments in women frontline healthcare workers and healthcare systems in low-income countries. Women are on the frontlines fighting this pandemic. And they are the solution.   And yet, even though 70 percent of these frontline and community healthcare workers across the globe are women, none of the solutions presented to address COVID so far have been adequately  built around their needs or their role in ending the pandemic.    None have sufficiently focused on alleviating the secondary impacts of COVID on their lives, as healthcare workers, but also women in their community –unpaid caregivers and primary wage earners.   And, none have truly focused on investing specifically and significantly in these women, the local groups they lead, or the community health systems that support them, without which last mile delivery will be nearly impossible.   In fact, two years in, the pandemic is  still raging in so much of the world, yet still only around  5% of people in lower income countries have been fully  vaccinated,  because of our moral and political failure to center the role of these women, and our lack foresight in how critical they are to ending the pandemic.     Soon, ramped up production of vaccines means that LMIC will have to delivery 7.5 times more vaccines a month than ever have before. That means we are rapidly approaching a moment where the whole world  will watch as the vaccine doses it just manufactured and shared sit and expire in ports and warehouses.   A serious investment in last-mile delivery that centers the role of women healthcare workers is not a choice. It is the missing piece of the puzzle everyone has so far been dancing around.  It is how we avoid the next variant and combat this one.   So, CARE’s question is, what will change at the next Global COVID Summit? Will we be able to say we mustered the political will to make the bold global investments necessary to end the pandemic? Or will we miss the moment, the moment we created, and allow the pandemic to continue to spread and mutate around the world devastating our own attempts at recovery? The choices we make now will decide that future.   http://www.care.org/news-and-stories/press-releases/with-the-emergence-of-omicron-women-frontline-healthcare-workers-and-vaccine-equity-still-key-to-addressing-covid/ http://www.careevaluations.org/evaluation/gender-gaps-in-vaccines-november-2021/ http://msf-access-campaign.prezly.com/in-the-wake-of-postponement-of-wtos-ministerial-msf-underscores-the-urgency-of-adopting-the-trips-waiver-for-peoples-unhindered-access-to-covid-19-medical-tools http://peoplesvaccine.org/our-demands/ http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/nurses-from-28-countries-file-un-complaint-alleging-human-rights-violations http://www.icj.org/global-jurists-call-for-waiver-of-global-intellectual-property-rights-for-covid-19-vaccines-and-therapeutics/ Visit the related web page
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