WHAT ARE WE LEARNING ABOUT COVID 19 GENDER RESPONSE ?

James Achanyi-Fontem, CEO Cameroon Link

"Gender-responsive design, implementation and monitoring of humanitarian programmes rely heavily on consultations, community-based approaches and face-to-face interactions with women and men, who are severely impacted by COVID-19 containment measures.. As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 rises among the estimated 160,000 Nigerian and Central African Republic refugees residing in 6 overcrowded areas in the far north and east regions of Cameroon, makeshift camps in Kousseri and Garoua Boulai, humanitarian agencies must change the ways they deliver programmes in order to maintain physical distancing and adhere to strict hygiene protocols. By examining how these changes are impacting the ability to deliver gender-responsive and gender-sensitive programmes (GSP), Cameroon Link hopes in this report to inform humanitarian responders and enable them to consider strategies to mitigate any risks. Cameroon Link explains here that, since 2019, gender actors in Cox's Bazaar tents have been working to focus the humanitarian response to the specific needs of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups. They have, for example, promoted gender equality through gender mainstreaming and used advocacy and other approaches to support the empowerment of women and girls. However, with community engagement strategies needing adaptation to COVID-19 containment measures, and some key initiatives such as capacity-building around women's leadership being largely placed on hold, the concern is that gains achieved in the past year could be reversed. To understand the situation, Cameroon Link conducted 4 key informant interviews from June 15-20, 2020 with gender and protection experts working across the humanitarian sectors in the Kousseri and Garoua Boulai refugee response. The researchers also examined publicly available secondary data. Kousseri perceptions included in the report were collected by the International Organization for Migration (IOM)'s Communicating with Communities (CwC) team, which includes camlink field researchers, through a weekly awareness and data collection exercise guided by COVID-19 analytical framework.

The analysis identified risks such as: • Given the rapid pace of the COVID-19 response, GSP may not be prioritised because it is not considered life-saving, and protection issues may be overlooked during a time where protection needs are actually increasing - creating further discrimination, exploitation, and unequal access to services. • Limited access of gender and protection staff to the field due to COVID-19 restrictions entails risk that the response will be unable to quickly identify and respond to urgent gender and protection needs going forward. • In addition to facing increased insecurity in the camps, camlink female volunteers report being stigmatised and harassed due to their association with international humanitarian workers, who are perceived as vectors of the disease. Furthermore, socially restrictive norms limit the access of women and girls to public spheres; women who do not strictly adhere to these norms often experience backlash. The resultant reduced presence of female staff and volunteers could diminish humanitarians' ability to equally serve women and men. In the strict social-religious context of Kousseri and Garoua Boulai communities, it is not acceptable for women to substantially interact with men outside of their households, which is why the presence of female staff and volunteers is essential to delivering humanitarian assistance and services to women.

COVID-19 has disrupted face-to-face interactions in safe places such as women friendly spaces (WFS), which have been a key way to reach those in need of safe gender-based violence (GBV) - the rates of which are elevated during lockdown - and child protection case management and referrals. Movement and access restrictions limit the ability of case managers to interview survivors privately and confidentially, and experts report that women do not trust or feel comfortable using phones for such sensitive issues. • Poor mobile and internet connections have made it difficult to inform the population of changes to services and of COVID-19 developments, as well as to ensure they have access to humanitarian services. This is particularly the case for women (as well as children and the elderly), who are substantially less likely than men to have access to (and/or time to use) mobile communication. • Essential awareness messages not specific to COVID-19, such as on GBV, sexual and reproductive health (SRH), and gender, often disseminated through distribution sites and service centres, may not be prioritised over public health messages. Moreover, public health messages are not always gender-responsive, resulting in information being either inaccessible to women and girls (in format and content) or not relevant to them. • Providing essential information and ensuring continuous engagement and consultation with the affected population is challenging in the COVID-19 context, especially for women, girls, and other vulnerable populations with less access to public space. Specifically, the voices of women and other marginalised groups are likely to be underrepresented when relying solely on the remote data collection methods that are necessary during the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, there are some potential benefits to emerge from this situation; for instance: • The increased role of volunteers in the response necessitated by restrictions on official humanitarian workers presents an opportunity to build on past efforts to empower refugee volunteers, especially women, to work within their own communities to identify problems, and solutions. Specifically, more than 20 volunteers across all 6 camps and adjacent Garoua Boulai communities in the east region are conducting awareness sessions and outreach to the most vulnerable to disseminate life-saving messages. Despite social and cultural challenges, Kousseri and Garoua Boulai women in particular have been self-mobilising, forming networks, and raising awareness on COVID-19 across all camps. • Major changes in distributions, particularly door-to-door modalities, have some positive impacts on gender-sensitive programming, including: reducing the need for vulnerable households, particularly female-headed households, to travel to distribution points and carry heavy items; ensuring that distributed goods (e.g., menstrual hygiene management kits) make it to households; and helping deliver life-saving messages door to door to those with less access to public spaces who would not normally receive such messages. • Some gender experts highlighted that, as their normal protection programmes have been put on hold due to the restrictions, they have been able to shift their attention to increasing capacity to strengthen gender and protection mainstreaming in essential assistance and services such as isolation and treatment centres. • Reportedly, funding for gender programming has not been negatively impacted in the short term by the COVID-19 pandemic