Since 2007 the Crisis Prevention and Recovery Unit of the UNDP Pacific Centre and implementing partners such as Fiji Red Cross Society, Fiji National Disaster Management Office (NDMO), and the Secretariat of the Pacific Islands Applied Geosciences Commission (SOPAC) have undertaken a pilot project in the Navua, Fiji. The objective of the project is to strengthen local level risk management by building linkages between local government and risk sensitive community.

 

In July 2008 implementing partners conducted the first Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment (VCA) in targeted communities in the Navua area. The VCA is used worldwide by the International Federation for Red Cross/Red Crescent (IFRC) in the most vulnerable communities to identify local capacities to cope with issues ranging from socio-economic phenomena like unemployment to natural hazards like flood. A VCA is a participatory research methodology which engages the community to collect first-hand data from several sources/community focus groups while at the same time creating a sense of ownership by the community.

 

The VCA in the Navua area paid particular attention to and documented the participation of women and men in the various planning mechanisms and focused on the roles played women and men. Preliminary findings of the VCA focus group discussions with women revealed that while there are active women’s groups in the community, they have very little role in decision making processes regarding development. Further there was concern that decisions made by men were not always equitable and most commonly did not involve women. Concerns were also expressed by the women’s focus groups that men were not very efficient in disseminating early warnings to the women to enable them to undertake their preparedness work in adequate time thereby making households more vulnerable to loss in the face of disaster. In addition, during floods, which occur regularly in the Navua area, women, who are less likely to know how to swim than men, sometimes remain in their houses to circulate flood waters to prevent mud from settling into their houses.

 

Gender sensitizing participatory approaches in this way may give practitioners a better understanding of existing gender relations and social systems. Using these as entry points is more likely to have sustainable impacts on behavior and attitudes that foster gendered vulnerabilities to climate change, over time. Such an approach ultimately has the potential to inform the targeting of preparedness programs to ensure that some sectors of the population are not rendered more vulnerable to the impacts of disasters and climate change as a result of reduced access to resources and information.

 

Some of the findings of this gender sensitizing participatory approach will be published in “Gender & Development”, a journal published by Oxfam focusing specifically on international gender and development issues. Findings will also be shared amongst partners and CROP agencies and therefore contributed to building a body of knowledge regarding Gender, Adaptation to Climate Change (ACC) and DRR in the region.