ON March 8, 2024, the world will commemorate International Women’s Day as it does every year. This year, perhaps much more than other years, the day falls in the midst of a global crisis. The war in Gaza has had an inordinately harsh impact on women, who together with the children make up two-thirds of the population and thus two-thirds of the casualties. It is very possible that the famine conditions and disease outbreak are killing many more women than they are men.
Even in all this, there is hopeful change. One of the more heartening facts that has come to the fore in this world full of crisis is that women are increasingly making up more and more of the population of humanitarian workers. Even though they are underrepresented in the leadership ranks of most humanitarian organisations, they now make up 40 per cent of the humanitarian workforce.
The ability of these women to take humanitarian action means that communities themselves (to which the women often belong) are able to participate in crisis response and action. This also means that more women can be reached by humanitarian organisations, because in some countries male humanitarian workers do not have access to crisis-affected women at all.
Most of these humanitarian women are part of local or grassroots organisations, and thus are able to provide rapid crisis assessment by evaluating needs and communicating them to supply and distribution points. It is the success of humanitarian women from grassroots organisations that led leaders in the development industry to realise that the key to women’s........