High Level Panel Discussion: A Gender Perspective on Disaster Risk Management, Preparedness & Effective Response - Regional Sharefair on Gender and Resilience

The objectives of the High Level Panel Discussion are to:

• Better illustrate the vulnerabilities and impacts that natural and human-made disasters have on women and girls, which compromise their resilience, while exploring available options for effective gender-sensitive disaster risk reduction and management;
• Show how migration as a result of (natural or human-made) disasters greatly impacts the ability of women to remain resilient in their new settings, and examine how building resilience through effective gender-sensitive disaster risk reduction can help in rebuilding lives at a communities’ original locale to reduce the need for migration;
• Discuss how livelihood and well-being challenges, as a result of disasters affect women and girls to a greater extent thus disrupting their ability to “bounce back” after a disaster and delve into new and existing options to reduce risks through gender-sensitive disaster risk reduction;
• Deliberate on the importance of a gender-sensitive approach to urbanisation to reduce the negative impacts and review successful cases of gender-sensitive urbanization that have incorporated disaster risk reduction and management in their application.

• Examine how natural disasters may instigate conflict and how conflicts affect women disproportionately (compared to men) and what potential solutions may help to mitigate and reduce the impacts on women and their families.