United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women)
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Placing women’s rights at the centre of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates the efforts of the United Nations system to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world.
UN Women is the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.
UN Women supports UN Member States as they set global standards for achieving gender equality, and works with governments and civil society to design laws, policies, programmes and services needed to ensure that the standards are effectively implemented and truly benefit women and girls worldwide. It works globally to make the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals a reality for women and girls and stands behind women’s equal participation in all aspects of life, focusing on
- Women lead, participate in and benefit equally from governance systems
- Women have income security, decent work and economic autonomy
- All women and girls live a life free from all forms of violence
- Women and girls contribute to and have greater influence in building sustainable peace and resilience, and benefit equally from the prevention and mitigation of disasters and conflicts and humanitarian action
UN Women also coordinates and promotes the UN system’s work in advancing gender equality, and in all deliberations and agreements linked to the 2030 Agenda. The entity works to position gender equality as fundamental to the Sustainable Development Goals, and a more inclusive world.
Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by disasters and threats, including climate change. Due to gender-specific barriers and inequalities, women experience higher loss of lives and livelihoods during disasters and a longer recovery time. Across the board, from life expectancy to education, housing, health, safety, job security, and nutrition, women and girls are impacted more severely than men. Yet, women are largely excluded from shaping disaster risk reduction and resilience policy, strategies, and programmes.
The overall goal of UN Women’s disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience work is to save lives and livelihoods through gender-responsive—and thus better informed, targeted, and more effective—prevention, preparedness, and recovery.
In DRR and resilience, UN Women works to empower women as agents of change, leveraging their full potential for disaster prevention, preparedness and recovery to break down the gender-specific barriers which increase women’s disaster vulnerability, exclude women from shaping DRR processes and strategies, and hamper women’s and their communities’ recovery in the aftermath of disasters.
UN Women promotes gender-responsive DRR and resilience across its triple mandate through technical and policy support, provision of gender expertise to DRR mechanisms and processes, and by implementing programmes and projects for gender-responsive DRR and resilience building, including the Women’s Resilience to Disasters (WRD) programme, its signature DRR initiative.
UN Women supports gender-responsive and inclusive disaster risk reduction and resilience by:
- securing commitment for the gender-transformative disaster risk reduction and resilience;
- building an enabling environment and supporting system-wide change including strengthening normative frameworks, and women’s leadership and empowerment at all levels, providing capacity development, strengthening the collection and use of gender data and gender analysis, and mobilising networks and partners for more coordinated approaches; and
- supporting targeted action for ensuring women and girls have voice and agency to withstand multiple hazards, recover from disasters, and increase their resilience to future disasters and threats.
DRR Focal point
Dr. Rahel Steinbach, Women’s Resilience to Disasters Global Coordinator and Technical Lead for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience, Policy, Programme and Intergovernmental Division (PPID); [email protected]
The Sendai Framework Voluntary Commitments (SFVC) online platform allows stakeholders to inform the public about their work on DRR. The SFVC online platform is a useful toolto know who is doing what and where for the implementation of the Sendai Framework, which could foster potential collaboration among stakeholders. All stakeholders (private sector, civil society organizations, academia, media, local governments, etc.) working on DRR can submit their commitments and report on their progress and deliverables.