1 May 2010

http://ijdh.org/archives/11814

By Abby Goldberg

After a whirl­wind six days in Port au Prince, Emily and I have much to share. Our trip actu­ally came two weeks ahead of sched­ule. We received a request from the Pro­tec­tion Offi­cer for Sex­ual Exploita­tion and Abuse work­ing on behalf of the UN Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian Affairs, who relayed the enor­mous and imme­di­ate need for mech­a­nisms to stream­line pro­tec­tion, doc­u­men­ta­tion, and ser­vice pro­vi­sions around gender-based-violence. Her man­date was to cre­ate this mech­a­nism and she asked whether we could join an “inter­a­gency work­ing ses­sion” just a few days from our ini­tial phone call – in Port Au Prince – to pro­vide tech­ni­cal exper­tise at the meeting.

Just a few days later we were in the air and then sud­denly on the ground in the midst of the rub­ble and rebuild­ing efforts under way. Our first engage­ment, after a brief meet­ing with our host, was a secu­rity brief­ing with MINUSTAH – the UN secu­rity detail oper­at­ing in Haiti for the bet­ter part of the past decade. We then attended a brief coor­di­na­tion meet­ing at which we heard the orga­nizer ask­ing for sug­ges­tions of more real­is­tic and con­crete items they could request from donors in the US, who most recently had sup­plied a num­ber of gas guz­zling SUV’s to this coun­try – where gas is in short sup­ply if avail­able at all.

Abby at BAI office

Port-Au-Prince is a city of con­tra­dic­tions, at once com­pletely dev­as­tated, at once filled with hope for a dif­fer­ent kind of future for Haiti. One week later, after meet­ing with thir­teen local women lead­ers from five dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions, teach­ing and actu­ally learn­ing far more in the process, we are back in New York. This post includes some early reflec­tions and learn­ing that resulted from our time in Haiti.

Why Haiti’s Women?
Dig­i­tal Democ­racy has been work­ing in Haiti since before the earth­quake, and we worked to sup­port the tech community’s response in help­ing to save lives in the early weeks fol­low­ing the dis­as­ter. In March, at the Com­mis­sion on the Sta­tus of Women, I attended a panel at which women lead­ers from Haiti spoke about their real­ity – pre and post earth­quake – and I real­ized that like in con­flict and post-conflict set­tings where there are oppor­tu­ni­ties for cre­at­ing vast struc­tural change in favor of equal­ity, nat­ural dis­as­ters pro­vide a sim­i­lar oppor­tu­nity. Women in Haiti have always been excluded from decision-making and for­mal gov­er­nance processes through­out Haiti’s his­tory, but the more I read and heard from Haiti’s women, the more I learned about the vast legal and cul­tural dis­crim­i­na­tion that has led to decades of vio­lence tar­get­ing women and their rel­a­tive poverty and suf­fer­ing among Haiti’s already poor pop­u­la­tion. In the 1990s, after the mil­i­tary coup, polit­i­cal rapes became a cause around which many of the lead­ing women’s orga­ni­za­tions today were founded. Nonethe­less, while com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions have devel­oped to fill the vac­uum of for­mal responses, women’s access to proper med­ical, psy­choso­cial, and legal atten­tion is barely exis­tent. The earth­quake wors­ened the lot of these women, but it is also an oppor­tu­nity for ral­ly­ing behind them to ensure their access to aid, and ulti­mately, a greater share of decision-making power. These are just a few of the facts I learned that led me to ded­i­cate my ener­gies to work­ing with women of Haiti:

Approx­i­mately one third of Haiti’s pop­u­la­tion was directly affected by the earth­quake. Many of the peo­ple we met on the trip lost an imme­di­ate mem­ber of their fam­ily, and amputees and oth­ers who were injured by the earth­quake are vis­i­ble every­where in Port Au Prince. The dis­as­ter, and the sub­se­quent human­i­tar­ian response, is unprece­dented. Sim­i­larly, dis­trust of gov­ern­ing pow­ers by a large swatch of Haiti’s civil soci­ety and thus, the strong com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions that have sprouted up to serve the needs in the gov­er­nance vac­uum cause unique chal­lenges for aid work­ers and Hait­ian soci­ety as a whole as it faces a pro­longed recov­ery and rebuilding.

Women’s sta­tus in Haiti before the earth­quake was already dis­mal. Now, it is sig­nif­i­cantly worse. Gen­der Based vio­lence was a major con­cern for national secu­rity pre-earthquake and women are at sig­nif­i­cantly increased risk and have reported grow­ing inci­dence of sex­ual violence.

* Less than 4% rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women in par­lia­ment – by far the low­est in the Hemisphere.
* Women have no land rights.
* Hait­ian women have not been part of Post Dis­as­ter Needs Assess­ment or any for­mal response after quake or recov­ery decision-making – no voice, access or visibility.
* Rape was only cod­i­fied as a crime in 2005 – it remains a “crime of honor” mean­ing that pun­ish­ment is con­tin­gent on the vir­gin­ity of the woman and mit­i­gated sen­tenc­ing is avail­able for mar­ry­ing their victim.
* Four of the most impor­tant women lead­ers behind the women’s move­ment died in quake. It is hard to assess the impact of the quake on the net­work long term but for now, there has been a loss lead­er­ship and many mem­bers are home­less and displaced.
* The Women’s Min­istry has scant resources. For­mal responses to the prob­lem are lim­ited and the UN and NGO com­mu­nity still has not found an effec­tive solu­tion to stream­line pro­tec­tion and report­ing mech­a­nisms for address­ing this grow­ing human­i­tar­ian crisis.

While this his­tory is the rea­son we went to work with Hait­ian women, we departed for Haiti with two pri­mary goals. First, we wanted to solid­ify rela­tion­ships with actors on the ground and learn more about the use of technology—including mobile phones and map­ping software—to stream­line and more effec­tively address sex­ual vio­lence and child pro­tec­tion in the after­math of the earth­quake. We met with the amaz­ing folks at OCHA and other UN agen­cies includ­ing UNIFEM, UNICEF and the UN Spe­cial Envoy for Haiti on Gen­der; NGO part­ners includ­ing the Bureau des Avo­cats Inter­na­tionaux (Inter­na­tional Lawyer’s Bureau), Parn­ters in Health, the Insti­tut Interuni­ver­si­taire de Recherche et Devel­opp­ment (Interuni­ver­sity insti­tute for Research and Devel­op­ment), and com­mu­nity based groups includ­ing KOFAVIV, FAVILEK, CONAMSI, and other women’s com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions. We learned so much from them all.

Sec­ond, we wanted to do what we could in just a short week to give tools to women lead­ers that would enable them to have greater voice, vis­i­bil­ity, access, and impact in the rebuild­ing effort. To this end, we lead a two-day photo and media train­ing and left cam­eras and other equip­ment behind so that they can con­tinue to hone their skills, doc­u­ment their work, and be empow­ered by technology.

What we learned

* There is an urgent and crit­i­cal win­dow of oppor­tu­nity right now in the after­math of the unprece­dented dis­as­ter in Haiti to sup­port the women who are dis­pro­por­tion­ately affected and lack­ing access to offi­cial chan­nels of aid and recon­struc­tion decision-making. Now is the time to cre­ate impor­tant prece­dent for women and dis­as­ter risk/response/empowerment in Haiti that can have broad impli­ca­tions for coun­tries around the world sus­cep­ti­ble to nat­ural disasters.
* Over the course of close to a dozen meet­ings with many of the major play­ers at the UN, NGOs, and among com­mu­nity groups work­ing on gen­der based vio­lence and with Hait­ian women – we received con­sis­tent val­i­da­tion and sup­port for our work and the impor­tant value it can add to efforts on the ground to sup­port women and to address grow­ing vio­lence tar­get­ing them.
* Mobile access is higher in Haiti than most other places in the world – even in camps – and almost equal access for men and women.
* One of the great­est sat­is­fac­tions of the trip was learn­ing that some of the women’s orga­ni­za­tions we worked with had been pay­ing for pho­tog­ra­phers to doc­u­ment their work, in part to seek fund­ing and vis­i­bil­ity. Now they can do this themselves.
* The women’s orga­ni­za­tions have lit­tle recog­ni­tion out­side of their com­mu­ni­ties. Orga­ni­za­tions have no web­sites and hard to find.
* There is a role to be played by agile, small NGOs and other “dis­rup­tive” forces – like Dig­i­tal Democ­racy – to build bridges between var­i­ous UN agen­cies and their respec­tive “man­dates”, com­mu­nity based groups, and inter­na­tional NGOs.
* The UN and all inter­na­tional actors must do a bet­ter job of find­ing ways to work with the local com­mu­nity in part­ner­ship. Hait­ian com­mu­nity groups are strong and effec­tive, but lack resources and more impor­tantly, access to the meet­ings where their voices and per­spec­tive must be heard. For exam­ple, dur­ing one meet­ing we attended, one Hait­ian com­mu­nity orga­nizer came to par­tic­i­pate but was only able to gain entry to the meet­ing dur­ing the sec­ond half after being stopped at the gate to the base and need­ing some­one from the meet­ing to retrieve him to be able to enter and con­tribute his per­spec­tive. No other rep­re­sen­ta­tives from local com­mu­nity groups were present at that meeting.

We remain grate­ful to every­one who helped us to make this trip pos­si­ble and for the con­tri­bu­tions that enabled us to bring dig­i­tal cam­eras to leave with the women lead­ers we worked with last week­end. Their pho­tos are incred­i­ble – the next post will share more in detail.

What you can do
Our pilot media work­shop made clear the need for train­ings that sup­port women’s orga­ni­za­tions – by con­tribut­ing to our work, you can help us return to Haiti to fur­ther sup­port these women.

Please help us to sup­port Hait­ian women’s pro­tec­tion and secu­rity by view­ing a short film pro­duced by our part­ners at the New Media Advo­cacy Project, the Insti­tute for Jus­tice and Democ­racy in Haiti, and Part­ners in Health on sex­ual vio­lence in the camps fol­low­ing the Jan­u­ary earthquake.

http://digital-democracy.org/2010/05/01/reflections-from-a-week-among-ha...