Enhancing Resilience through Gender Equality
CARE Australia has been working with communities in the Asia-Pacific region for over three decades, supporting women, their families, and local communities to build their capacities to prepare, adapt and respond to disasters and climate change. Using participatory, rights-based approaches, with a specific focus on women, CARE has made good progress in assessing and responding to the vulnerability and capacity of women, and in promoting and enhancing more gender equitable social relations in its programming.
Gender Equality and Women’s Voice in Asia-Pacific Resilience Programing
This report is the culmination of desk- and field-based research across six of CARE Australia’s country programs – Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu, and Vietnam. The author consulted over 600 documents, and the research team engaged directly with 89 people (50 female, 39 male). This report finds that highly gendered roles and responsibilities mean higher workloads and lower recognition of women for their work. Men and women have distinct gendered roles in agricultural production, income generation, management of natural resources and household activities, and men tend to have more authority and control of power and resources within the household and community. This leads to inequality for women in terms of division of labour, decision-making power, and access to resources.
Learning from CARE’s Resilience Programing in the Asia-Pacific
Based on evidence from CARE’s work in the Asia-Pacific region, this learning paper provides insights into what it looks like to work towards gender equality in resilience-related programming, and how different approaches have been effective so far. At the same time, this paper recognizes that there is still a lot that is unknown about what happens in people’s lives as a result of integrating gender equality, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and community-based adaptation (CBA).