Women are key in tackling disaster: UN officials

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator Helen Clark of New Zealand delivers a speech during the "Institutionalization of Women's Leadership in Disaster Risk Reduction" meeting on the sidelines of the third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai on March 15, 2015. - AFP

Caring for families

Remi Sogunro, who represents the United Nations Population Fund in Liberia, said women bore the brunt not only of natural disasters like that unfolding in Vanuatu, but in human catastrophes like the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

“Women are caregivers at home, and when their... families are sick, they take care of them,” he said.

Around 25,000 people are known to have been infected with Ebola since the latest outbreak began in December 2013. Around 10,000 of them have died.

In Liberia, one of the worst-hit countries, thousands of people were infected including 300 health workers, said Sogunro.

“Half of (the health workers) died. Most of them are nurses, some of them are midwives, a few of them are senior medical doctors. Many of these were women,” he said.

“The women were trying to help the country to stop the Ebola virus and they died in the course of duty. So you can see why it’s really very important to talk about women in the Ebola forefront,” he said.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that even in developed countries like Japan, much more needed to be done to get women more involved in reducing the impact of disasters.

“In all regions of Japan, it was predominantly men who participated in disaster risk reduction drills,” he told the conference, which opened just days after Japan marked the fourth anniversary of the 2011 quake-tsunami that ravaged the northeast coast.

“However, if a massive earthquake were to strike during the day, most of the people at home would be women. A woman’s perspective is therefore essential for community disaster risk reduction efforts,” he said.

But Rachel Kyte, Vice President of the World Bank, said even in a forum like the Sendai conference, where participants agree on the need to empower women, there are few in evidence.

On Saturday she had 11 meetings. “In nine of those meetings I was the only woman,” she said.

“I really think this has to change,” Kyte said. “There are not enough women here, and women’s perspective is not well enough integrated.

“I can’t think of a community... where it isn’t the women who know exactly what’s going on.

“So not to have women in the rooms here is absurd,” she said.