aid

It’s my pleasure to introduce guest columnist: Valerie A. Young. Valerie is Advocacy Coordinator for the National Association of Mothers’ Centers (NAMC) and the MOTHERS Initiative. She blogs at Your (Wo)Man in Washington Blog. Welcome, Valerie!

Gender-Responsive Aid in Haiti

The push continues to get food to the people of Haiti. Distribution efforts are often hampered by unrest and chaos when thousands of starving people compete to get their hands on something to eat. The Washington Post reports that local authorities are now implementing a coupon system, directed to women and girls, who demonstrate less aggression and are more likely to share the food with others, including the young, elderly, or disabled, instead of selling it. As the primary caregivers for family members, women are particularly well situated to get more food to more people in their homes and neighborhoods, in less time and with less conflict.

Previous posts in this space have noted the gender-specific needs of women and girls, especially following crises that exacerbate their pre-existing vulnerability. In Haiti, sexual violence, poverty, hunger, and disease were already destroying the lives of women before the earthquake. Aid targeted to these populations, it is argued, is more effective for women and girls, and benefits the wider community as well, rather than coming at the expense of men. However, in addition to being a specific target for aid, the particular position of women renders them more effective as the conduit for relief, as aid organizers are now discovering.

This isn’t the first time international aid organizers have harnessed the power of the “girl effect,” the phenomenon of targeting aid to adolescent girls who start a chain reaction, multiplying the effect and reach of the initial investment by passing it on. For example, if a girl has an income, she will reinvest nearly all of it for the benefit of her family. If a girl has a goat, she will sell the milk, send her children to school, breed more goats, hire others to care for the herd and sell the milk, and so on. Disaster zones around the world have begun to focus on women’s ability to maximize and enhance relief operations. Countries funneling aid to the developing world, including the United States, are implementing the practice as well, as is evident from the numerous mentions made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Further proof is documented in the work of Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools. If a girl in the developing world receives at least 7 years of education, she will be older when she marries, bear fewer children, increase her earning power, and have healthier children. She is less likely to be beaten by her husband, less likely to die in childbirth, and more likely to be capable of supporting herself economically. There is a growing consensus that women may be the most effective agents of change on the planet, due to their ability to multiply the value of a resource and their willingness to share it with others.

The conclusion that women in the developed world must also be capable of transformative change cannot be far behind. After all, the girl effect arises from gender, not geography. Why aren’t women in the industrialized world also seen as offering exponential opportunity for optimizing human potential, sharing responsibility for governing, producing, educating, caring, healing, and leading? The impediments that exist, which make mothers more likely to live in poverty, and women more likely to work in low-paying jobs, cannot be the result of our lesser capacity or inferior potential. They cannot be the natural consequence of an inescapable truth of innate gender disparity. If the girl effect is true (and it seems more than amply supported by the evidence), then maternal poverty and women’s limited representation in certain aspects of society can only be the result of artificial distinctions, man-made barriers, and social constructs put in place and continually reinforced by learned behavior… which can be unlearned, with intentional, deliberate, and informed action. Distributing food aid via women, reducing violence and aggression, and getting more food to more people in less time following a disaster is precisely what such action looks like.

Welcome back to guest poster Natalie Wilson, whose new column, Pop Goes Feminism, starts tomorrow!

It’s not about hating men, it’s about helping Haitian women

If one can wrangle any positive shards from the rubble that now pervades Haiti’s landscape, I would say that it would be the tremendous outpouring of concern and aid. Unfortunately, such concern tends to fade and aid donations shrivel once the media moves on to its next story.

Once the Haiti earthquake is merely a blip on the mental desktop of most Americans (like Hurricane Katrina before it), the situation for the majority of Haitians will not have changed for the better. Rather, especially for women and children, the situation is likely to be even worse than it was before. This is why some organizations are targeting their aid at women and children.

As reported by Tracy Clark-Flory, the “women and children” first aid model some organizations are taking makes sense due to the fact that women and children are typically the ones most vulnerable in the wake of a catastrophe.

Before the earthquake, Haitian women were already dealing with extreme poverty, lack of adequate healthcare, high rates of HIV/AIDS, and huge infant and maternal mortality rates. They live in a country that only made a rape a criminal offence in 2005, where at least 50% of women living in the poorer areas of Port-au-Prince have been raped. Haiti also has a serious child trafficking problem and huge numbers of girls working as domestic servants.

The global mamas of Haiti, as detailed by the International Childcare organization, must cope with the fact that one in eight Haitian children never live to see their fifth birthday due to infectious disease, pregnancy-related complications, and delivery-related complications. In Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, many parents cannot afford to send their children to school, give them proper medical care, or even guarantee that their children will have safe drinking water.

For all of these reasons, Haiti needs what Lucinda Marshall calls Gender-Responsive Aid. As she notes, “there are needs that are specific to women, particularly for pregnant women and mothers with new babies and the need to address the added vulnerability to violence that women face when government infrastructures are dysfunctional.” Yifat Susskind of MADRE explains that disasters are often followed by a rise in gender-based violence: “When men deal with very, very difficult stresses, one of their outlets is violence against women.”

In addition to the tendency for increased violence against women in the aftermath of a disaster (as also noted here), women are already economically disadvantaged in Haiti (due in large part to what is commonly known as the feminization of poverty). As noted by MADRE,

“…women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes because they were at a deficit even before the catastrophe. In Haiti, and in every country, women are the poorest and often have no safety net, leaving them most exposed to violence, homelessness and hunger in the wake of disasters.

Because of their role as caretakers and because of the discrimination they face, women have a disproportionate need for assistance. Yet, they are often overlooked in large-scale aid operations. In the chaos that follows disasters, aid too often reaches those who yell the loudest or push their way to the front of the line. When aid is distributed through the “head of household” approach, women-headed families may not even be recognized, and women within male-headed families may be marginalized when aid is controlled by male relatives.”

To make matters even worse, when the earthquake hit, Haiti’s Ministry of Women was holding a meeting–and nearly everyone there was killed or injured. (For the full story, see here). The loss of these women’s rights leaders is a severe blow to relief efforts throughout the entire country.

Despite all the reasons for gender-responsive aid, some have equated this approach with misandry–as in this article. Such spurious claims miss the point entirely and fail to recognize that gender-responsive aid benefits everyone, not just women. Gender-responsive aid isn’t about hating men, it’s about recognizing a gendered response to this disaster is necessary.

A few things have been on my mind recently.

One is fellow blogger and writer extraordinaire Alison Piepmeier, who posted yesterday about her newly diagnosed brain tumor. Alison, we’re all thinking about you.

The other is Haiti. I don’t have much more to add about the incalculable loss or the soul-crushing devastation, but I did want to point readers towards a very helpful essay by anthropologist Mark Schuller, a resident of New Paltz (where I teach), professor at CUNY-York College, and co-producer/co-director of the documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy. Mark has worked for many years in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and though he was not in Haiti for the devastating earthquake that occurred last week, he left the U.S. this morning to join a medical team to provide on-the-ground disaster relief.

Mark’s essay, “Starfish and Seawalls: Responding to Haiti’s Earthquake, Now and Long-Term,” is a must-read that provides essential information about Haiti and what we all can do. In particular, he details some central questions we should all ask when evaluating NGOs involved in Haitian relief efforts and mentions several particularly noteworthy organizations, including Partners in Health, Fonkoze, and Lambi Fund.

Last I heard, Mark had landed safely in Haiti. My thoughts are with him and everyone else in Haiti.