The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has started a series of workshops on women and children issues to highlight the challenges being faced by them during disasters. The workshops, aimed at bringing into limelight the gender-related problems in disasters or emergency situations, were organised by Gender and Child Cell working under NDMA and UN-Women. These workshops would be also conducted in different provinces to highlight problems faced by women and children during a calamity. In this regard, the first workshop of the series was conducted in Karachi in which all stakeholders, including representatives of government departments, donor agencies, non-government organizations, civil society representatives and gender experts and presented their input for preparing a concrete policy.
Talking to APP here on Sunday, Member Disaster Risk Reduction NDMA, Ahmed Kamal said in disasters women, children and old people are most vulnerable but unfortunately there was no policy or guidelines to address their requirements especially in case of emergency situations. Considering the need, he added, NDMA established ‘Gender and Child Cell’ which started a consultative process at federal an provincial level and prepared a well researched draft of a future framework. “The process of finalisation of the policy draft would be completed till the end of this year and for the purpose this series of workshop has been planned to get input of provinces and stakeholders working on ground,” Ahmed Kamal said.
He informed that NDMA was also working on a ‘Gender and Child Referral System’ under which needs of women and children will be defined at different stages of disaster including, rescue, relief, rehabilitation, prevention etc.
Ahmed Kamal said the step has been taken for mainstreaming Gender and Child Issue in the context of socio-cultural background and to facilitate them within least possible time.
