Gender Equality in the Earthquake Humanitarian Response for North West Syria

Women-owned businesses (WOBs) in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region could make significant contributions to entrepreneurial activity and countries’ economic growth, but face challenges and barriers. This report examines access to finance in the United Arab Emirates for WOBs; describes government and private measures to promote women’s entrepreneurship; looks at global best practices and makes recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders to improve women-owned businesses’ access to financing.

This newsletter captures the latest updates on the implementation of the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) in Lebanon. The newsletter includes the key highlights and achievements of the WPHF programme partners' towards enhancing women’s participation in the Beirut Port Explosion’s response and recovery process.

UN Women and OCHA jointly examine the extent to which issues of gender equality were factored into various stages of the 2020 Flash Appeal in response to the Beirut port explosions.

This report presents the results of the independent evaluation of UN Women’s ‘Strengthening the Resilience of Syrian Women and Girls and Host Communities’ (“Madad”) programme and offers lessons and recommendations for future programming on gender equality and women’s empowerment. The Synthesis report includes country specific annexes for Iraq, Jordan and Turkey.

This guidance note seeks to assist policy and programme actors to conduct rapid assessments that are fully responsive to gender and intersectionality. It is focused on three critical steps: the development of assessment surveys/questionnaires, their implementation, the analysis of findings and resulting recommendations.

This document outlines UN Women’s response plan for the 2020 Beirut Plan – a plan that works across the humanitarian-development-peace and security nexus to provide immediate relief to those in need, and to ensure that longer term recovery and reconstruction both addresses the needs of women and girls, and promotes gender equality.

This year’s regular resources report analyses how UN Women mobilized its core contributions in 2019 to fulfil its normative, coordination, and operational activities mandate, in order to improve the lives of women and girls worldwide. Through the presentation of tangible results, this report presents case studies at the global, regional, and country levels to showcase the impact that regular resources have in the countries where UN Women is present.

Crisis management or emergency situations such as COVID-19 can have serious impacts on the lives of women and girls, if gender dimensions are not considered. Issues such as care work, economic autonomy, physical or sexual violence, women's participation in decision-making, disaggregation of data by sex, gender analysis, and irregular migration are just some of the areas of concern that must be part of an effective response to the health crisis that the world is going through right now.

Humanitarian needs continue to grow with nearly 132 million people in need of assistance in 2018, due to conflict, persecution, and natural disasters. The average humanitarian crisis now lasts more than nine years, and periods of forced displacement more than seventeen. Women and girls who make up approximately half of this 132 million face daily discrimination and violence. The breakdown of protection mechanisms and destruction of essential services and economic structures in crises hits the already marginalized hardest.