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Gender in Resilience
A few weeks ago (yes that’s how long it has been), I gave a talk on ways in which disaster management and recovery projects – and indeed all resilience efforts – can better integrate gender. Many of us in the development community struggle to incorporate meaningful gender actions while planning for resilience because they focus on the “disaster”. The trick is to think and plan for “normal” and take into consideration existing gender norms and intersectionality. For those grappling with mainstreaming gender in resilience initiatives and struggling to explain why the additional gender lens will make communities more secure and, in the event of a calamity, recover faster and better,…
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The fault of our generation
Last week, I was invited to participate in a panel on Gender the Youth SDG Summit, UNITE2030. Totally up my street, I thought, as I scribbled my key messages: post 2030, its time for gender equality to be the norm… let’s broaden the narrow focus of gender in SDG 5 to include LGBTIAQ+… this, I can do in my sleep, I thought cockily. What else? Young people are incredible advocates and activists, but it is time to move from activism to influencing policy, so how about making that shift, being part of the democratic process and changing the system from within? Agitate to increase women’s representation in local bodies and…
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Afghanistan – since I had to…
I volunteered to work for the polio programme in Afghanistan in 2008, fresh from my first international assignment in Nigeria. It was only in 2010 that this materialised. I spent half a year with UNICEF working on eradicating polio, a job that came quite naturally to me since I wrote my book, but nothing had prepared me for the complexities that came with working in a country that had only known conflict. At the end of six months, I was weary and weatherbeaten. But Afghanistan was a drug that was hard to shake. So I returned. This time, I transitioned from polio (and public health) to regional integration and from…
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#NoCoverUp
Are we really surprised about the spate of domestic violence unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic? This brief by UNWOMEN has estimated that globally, 243 million women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced sexual and/or physical violence perpetrated by an intimate partner in the previous 12 months. “This number is likely to increase as security, health, and money worries heighten tensions and strains are accentuated by cramped and confined living conditions.” What was that last sentence again? It almost sounded like a justification for domestic violence. As the world attempts a feeble recovery from the pandemic, economic uncertainty will continue for a long time. More people…
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Democracy 1.0 (or five remarkable things about the 2020 US Elections)
It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,the holy places where the races meet;from the homicidal bitchin’that goes down in every kitchento determine who will serve and who will eat.From the wells of disappointmentwhere the women kneel to prayfor the grace of God in the desert hereand the desert far away:Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. Democracy, Leonard Cohen Yes, like millions across the world, I was glued to my TV from November 4th until finally, CNN called the winner of the hotly contested electoral battle of 2020. Like everything about this year, the Presidential elections were unlike any other. For one, there was were just one two significant debates…
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The Right to Health
What do Latvia, Uruguay, and Senegal have in common? Other than very low COVID-19 fatalities, they also have a constitutional guarantee to the Right to Health. As Europe closes down in its own unique way to battle the “second” wave of the pandemic, I am drawn to the notion that perhaps things would have turned out different if countries guaranteed to their citizens, the fundamental Right to Health. By this, I don’t mean just funding departments or ministries or enabling access to public healthcare. I mean, going a step further and guaranteeing this in national constitutions. Would that tip the scales on the pandemic? Would there be fewer fatalities? Would…
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Pandemic & the Poverty trap
India holds the record for pulling the most number of people out of poverty in a single decade. The UNDP’s multidimensional poverty index of 2019 calculated that from 2005 until 2016/17, 271 million people had been lifted out of poverty in India. This stunning feat rested largely on targeted poverty eradication programmes in several low income states, many of them supported by the World Bank. All these programmes hinged on women’s self help groups that started out as a savings initiative to leverage institutional credit, transforming over time, into undertaking businesses at scale and forming producer companies. Since 2003, I have observed groups in different Indian states, form, flop, dissolve,…
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Pandemic papers…
We were flying to Lisbon when I noticed for the first time, a tiny New York Times column about a new coronavirus that had come from the wet markets of Wuhan and spread across Hubei province in China. Having worked on infectious diseases before, we public health enthusiasts were in the habit of predicting the next apocalypse. SARS, MERS, H1N1, Ebola – they had all been truly disappointing. “You’ve got to read this,” I nudged my husband sprawled onto the seat beside me. He looked at the article and shrugged. “Seems to be localised to one province. They’ll have it under control in no time,” he said. Famous last words.…