Gender Matters: Lessons for Disaster Risk Reduction in South Asia

The idea of focusing on gender in a time of crisis may seem a misplaced priority. It is commonly assumed by the lay public and disaster preparedness and management professionals alike, that natural disasters are levellers, affecting everyone who comes within their orbit in a more or less equal fashion. But, in fact, disasters are extremely gendered events in terms of both their impacts and people's responses to them. Failure to acknowledge this can diminish the efficiency of disaster responses and help create new categories of victims. This book provides a synthesis of key findings from the literature, with the aim of helping key practitioners understand how and in what ways natural disasters have different impacts on the sexes, and what can be done to integrate a gender perspective into disaster preparedness and management work in the South Asian context. The book is an outcome of the project Living with risk sharing knowledge on disaster preparedness funded by the European Commission through their Humanitarian Aid department (DG ECHO) as part of the Disaster Preparedness ECHO programme (DIPECHO) in South Asia, and by ICIMOD.