Context
The report provides recommendations for CCCM agencies to scale women’s inclusion in the coordination of humanitarian responses in the context of camps, informal sites, and urban out-of-camp neighborhoods. While it is aimed at camp management broadly, the recommendations can be used to improve the participation of women in HLP-related responses.
Summary
The objective of this report is to understand the contributions women can make to CCCM practices, understand the challenges and enablers to women’s participation, and suggest steps CCCM agencies can take to overcome challenges and support enablers to women’s roles in CCCM in a wide range of displacement settings and cultural contexts.
The first section focuses on how displaced women can influence the services provided in their communities in both informal and formal governance structures and in collaboration with CCCM agencies. Examples of female-led conflict resolution in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp and women’s inclusion in information dissemination in Iraq are provided. The second section highlights the barriers to women’s role in coordination. The primary barrier highlighted is cultural norms that discriminate against women. An
overview of how humanitarian agencies can unintentionally reinforce these norms is provided. The third section discusses the enablers of women’s role in coordination and how CCCM agencies can address barriers to women’s participation. The recommendations fall into two broad categories:
- Creating and Supporting representative coordination and governance structures – recommendations detailed in Box 1, recommendations 1-6
- Building women’s capacity and resources for coordination – Box 2, recommendations 7-9.
The recommendations range from minimum requirements to strongly advised. For example, a strongly advised recommendation is facilitating access to an accessible women-only physical space for coordination, either provided directly by the CCCM agency or “borrowed” from a service provider or the community. These physical spaces could be used to train women on HLP and tenure security or as a safe space for women to express their tenure concerns/challenges. Box 3 provides a concise list for improving women’s safety by scaling the role of women in CCCM.
These recommendations could be used to increase women’s safety or mitigate backlash from HLP and tenure security interventions.
