INTRODUCTION

Few would dispute the potential for natural disasters and armed conflicts to have a disproportionate impact on women, especially in the developing world. Women who are primary caregivers, with greater responsibility for household work, have less time and capacity to mobilize resources for recovery. They are less likely to participate in the public sphere in which humanitarian relief is organized and delivered. They may be overlooked if relief efforts target programmes at household heads, or focus on primary employment as the sole source of livelihoods. And if these relief efforts also fail to collect gender-disaggregated data, the disproportionate impacts on women may not even register in monitoring mechanisms.

Population displacement induced by disaster or conflict can remove women from kinship structures that provide basic forms of social insurance against poverty and violence. Displacement also removes women from location-specific income, including access to common property resources. After displacement, women who return home are at risk from relatives or neighbours who take advantage of social turmoil and government weakness to deny their claims to land. In some cases, returning women will lose access to land because prevailing social or legal norms mediate their entitlement to land through a deceased or missing husband or relative. This is particularly the case for women who are widows, or who stand to inherit land from a deceased relative.

While these gendered risks of dispossession after conflict or disaster are real enough, the appropriate form and focus of any response is not so clear-cut. For humanitarian actors such as UN agencies and international NGOs, the orthodox prescription is to “mainstream” gender into rights-based programming. For example, a 1998 resolution of the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities notes the impact of land-related discrimination on women who are internally displaced.