Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

Research has shown that disasters impact men and women differently. While COVID-19 has been shown to disproportionately affect men physically, women are more likely to be adversely impacted by disasters generally, and more likely to be failed by recovery efforts that do not meet their needs. Consider how to develop gender-inclusive disaster recovery that considers impacts of COVID-19:

• Tackle the drivers of gender inequalities in areas such as access to healthcare and economic recovery e.g. impacts of COVID-19 on low paid precarious work, health risks to care workers
• Include multi-stakeholder processes that ensure women's rights organisations are included in designing national response and recovery measures - this should also include groups representing vulnerable or marginalised women
• Assess bid for new funding using an additional criteria of impact on gender responsiveness
• Increase funding and capacity development for local and national women's groups; including for action against gender-based violence which saw a global increase during the pandemic
• Strengthen COVID-19/disaster responses to address women's leadership roles, not only their vulnerability to the virus
• Examine the availability of gender-responsive health services and vital sexual and reproductive health needs at local level
• Consider communications designed for women, to reach women. Women and girls may be less likely to receive and contribute to accurate COVID-19 information due to patriarchal norms/structures
• Include the voices and rights of trans women in response and recovery so they are equally involved in determining needs

To inform investment decisions for the future, the Fiji Government worked with the World Bank to develop the country's first ever Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) to quantify and better understand the threat posed by natural hazards and climate change and to help design climate adaptation and risk management plans. The CVA paved the way for responding to short-term needs while boosting long-term sustainability and resilience. This applies directly to the COVID-19 crisis as the CVA provides a means to assess current, and candidate interventions that could be successful for sustainable economic recovery from COVID-19. Consider how a CVA could be used to:

• Co-opt government programs related to resilience into stimulus measures e.g. national development plans, infrastructure masterplans, or resilience plans already identify interventions that can be cross-checked against a sustainability checklist to determine relevant COVID-19 interventions that address both short and long term needs
• Determine locale-specific priorities for economic stimuli that account for local risks and needs. This may include accelerating interventions that are already expected to be delivered, expanding interventions already underway, or prioritizing interventions that are cross-sectoral e.g. improving agricultural productivity, the reliability of infrastructure, or by reducing energy
• Identify additional economic stimulus, generated from various resilience-building interventions, that could be used to mitigate the economic shocks imposed by the pandemic