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As Brits pick apart Labour’s inaugural budget, the world has witnessed a far more painful welfare slash: Israel’s brutal blow to Palestine’s already feeble aid provision.
On Monday, the Knesset passed two bills to ban UNRWA, Gaza’s largest provider of humanitarian support and the core infrastructure upon which almost all regional operators depend.
There is another story from the week we want to draw your attention to – see if you can connect the dots.
Last Thursday, the UN Security Council held its annual debate on ‘women, peace and security’, where they grimly observed that the proportion of women killed in armed conflicts doubled globally in a year.
Cases of conflict-related sexual violence increased by half. Despite (or rather, in keeping with) this, the proportion of aid targeted at ‘gender-specific services’ – such as reproductive health or gender-based violence – fell.
When aid is cut, women’s services are the first to go. This might seem fair: why help half a population when you can help all? When push comes to shove, surely universal services like food and shelter should get priority? And indeed, they do. But something is missed by this logic. When disaster strikes, women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men.
Crisis are not gender-blind: 90% of those killed during Bangladesh’s 1991 cyclone were women, as were 70% of casualties from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.
In war, innocent men are often served up as cannon fodder; but among those left to live in its shadow, patriarchy prevails. Not everyone starts with an equal level of need, and under extreme pressure, inequality thrives. As aid to Palestine is severed at the root, we must examine what additional cost women will pay for the continuing carnage of accused male war criminals.
Who better to answer this question, than women leading aid solutions in their own embattled communities of Yemen, Pakistan and one of the world’s biggest refugee camps, Kenya’s Kakuma? Their eye-witness testimonies help to explain the strangely sexist casualties coming from crises.
The first glaring oversight is reproductive healthcare. Waood Afara was pregnant when Houthi forces stormed Yemen’s capital in 2015 and plunged her country into war.
A doctor herself, she thanks Allah that her unborn child survived an air raid that blasted her from three floors up into rubble. She now works as a reproductive health officer for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Aden City, because “if we are not helping [ourselves], who will?”
When the UK reduced its international aid commitment from 0.7% of GNI to 0.5% in 2022, a leaked Government report warned this would lead to the deaths of thousands of pregnant women in Africa, as gender-specific programs would get the first axing. But reproduction is not ‘gender-specific’.
“When we take care of pregnant women, we save the backbone of the family,” said Dr Afara. “I have seen first-hand the impact of this. I have seen children who have been able to go to school and get education. I have seen communities that have been able to recover from conflict.”
The second reality overlooked by gender-blind aid, is that sexual violence and child forced marriage increase during crises. In my own