Women must be concerned at each degree of decision-making. Luke Dray/Getty Images
“No time for that” was the fixed chorus heard by gender and girls’s well being specialists working within the 2014/16 Ebola response. This was an emergency and the principle factor was to take care of the disaster.
It was the Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone outbreak of Ebola that signalled what was to come back for girls around the globe within the COVID-19 outbreak. Quarantines noticed an increase in home and intimate associate violence. Girls had been banned from faculty after they returned pregnant. Fear of well being centres and hospitals and closures led to will increase in different well being points. More girls died from maternal mortality than from Ebola.
In early 2020 I labored with girls around the globe to lift the flag of the potential gendered affect of COVID-19. But few individuals wished to pay attention. No time for that. As with Ebola, it’s typically solely when the hurt is completed that folks engaged on the response realise two essential issues. First, well being emergencies do quick and long run hurt to girls, disproportionately. And second, girls are important to responding to well being emergencies.
Ebola outbreaks are scary. We’ve come alongside method from 2014/16 and the Ugandan authorities is doing all the proper issues – alerting the world, contact tracing, defending frontline well being employees, working with conventional healers, and dealing on communications to avert stigma. But there’s a actual threat that when once more the problems that have an effect on girls and ladies throughout a well being emergency will likely be missed.
“Lessons discovered” is a drained international well being trope. But in the case of the affect on girls, we have to take motion and right here’s how.
5 steps to take to centre girls
First, no-one likes lockdowns. But quarantines and lockdowns are particularly a feminist subject. They hurt girls and put an elevated burden on their time and labour. If mandatory, any quarantine measures ought to be accompanied by a full assist package deal for susceptible girls. This means the federal government must be working with the ladies’s sector, notably these engaged on violence in opposition to girls from the onset – not as an afterthought. Any quarantine measures must be met with full social and welfare assist. International donors have to assist the Ugandan authorities to make this work.
Second, girls well being employees are typically clustered in neighborhood well being work. This entails door-to-door work on data communication, care and speak to tracing. During an Ebola outbreak that is excessive threat. Their private safety gear necessities must be prioritised alongside medical professionals. Moreover, plenty of neighborhood well being employees are volunteers, but they’re the bedrock of discovering data within the Ebola response. They must be paid. Health employees must be protected, not stigmatised or topic to violence.
Third, everybody concerned within the Ebola response ought to have coaching to detect and report sexual exploitation and abuse, together with the worldwide neighborhood. We don’t want a repeat of what occurred within the Democratic Republic of Congo – what specialists known as the worst case of sexual exploitation and abuse in UN historical past – the place 82 alleged perpetrators, 21 with direct hyperlinks to the World Health Organisation, had been accused of the abuse and exploitation of women and girls – as younger as 13.
Health emergencies carry a mass inflow of assets to a susceptible state of affairs: that is ripe territory for exploitation. Tackling abuse and exploitation ought to by no means be an afterthought; typically thought of when it’s too late. Instead, it ought to be addressed as an ever-present threat when responding to well being emergencies.
Fourth, we’d like good knowledge. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014/16 I developed the concept of girls being conspicuously invisible. They had been in every single place in frontline neighborhood well being work – however had been completely invisible in decision-making or official knowledge. Data ought to detect not solely the place and the way Ebola is spreading however who’s most susceptible. This means counting what number of males and what number of girls are getting and dying of Ebola. Data informs what measures must be put in place to assist individuals. Sex disaggregated knowledge is just not excellent (most programs fail to account for non-binary individuals for instance), however it’s a begin.
Finally, and I can’t stress this sufficient: girls must be concerned at each degree of decision-making. From the excessive profile Jane Ruth Aceng, Minister of Health in Uganda, to the contact tracing groups, to the surveillance squads. Women leaders don’t essentially imply higher illustration of girls’s points or girls pleasant insurance policies. However, on condition that the well being sector is very feminised, girls should sit across the tables that matter.
Learning from the previous
I’ve seen at first hand the hurt that well being emergencies did to girls in Sierra Leone within the 2014/16 outbreak.
When I began shouting about it in the course of the COVID-19 response, “No time for that” was accompanied by, “Where’s the proof and knowledge?”.
Thanks to tireless work and mobilisation of gender and international well being specialists around the globe, we’ve got the proof that well being emergencies hurt girls. Now we should act in order that this doesn’t occur once more in Uganda.
Sophie Harman receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.
