Policy Paper November 2010

Lessons from the Haiti Response and

Recommended Next Steps
An Analysis from InterAction’s Gender-Based Violence Working Group

For more information, The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12 was devastating. As with most crises, women
please contact: and girls were among both the most vulnerable and the most overlooked. Within the first week,
Elizabeth Bellardo reports of sexual violence emerged, as did stories of women and girls struggling to access as-
Senior Manager sistance and living in crowded and unsafe camps.
Humanitarian Policy and
Practice The location of the disaster in a major urban capital in a country with a recent history of social
InterAction and political upheaval, as well as poorly functioning institutions, presented the humanitarian
ebellardo@interaction.org
community with the challenge of responding to a multi-layered emergency of almost unprece-
dented scale and complexity. Yet while many aspects of this disaster were unique, much of the
failure to appropriately respond to the protection concerns of women and girls resulted from
known, chronic weaknesses in the system of emergency response.

Though gains have been made in raising the profile of gender issues in recent years, humanita-
rian actors still struggle to change the way that they coordinate, design, deliver and monitor
assistance to ensure that women and girls are not rendered more vulnerable in the process.
The humanitarian community continues to see women‟s protection as a second-tier concern in
crises, particularly natural disasters, and is slow to address gender-based violence (GBV) at the
onset of an emergency.

This paper examines some of the successes and failures of the response to the protection con-
cerns of women and girls following the Haiti earthquake and offers recommendations for action.
While natural disasters increase risks for women and girls, violence, abuse and exploitation are
not inevitable in such crises. By investing in early and robust action, women and girls can be
made safer, violence prevented, and a solid foundation built for women‟s and girls‟ empower-
ment post-crisis.

Review of the first three months: A critical window

The first weeks of an emergency provide a critical window in which to ensure that women‟s
protection is prioritized from the outset and early preventive action is taken to address women‟s
vulnerability. If women‟s protection is ignored during this period, it becomes much more difficult
to integrate such concerns later on when funding levels and priorities have been established,
www.InterAction.org assessments carried out, coordination structures solidified, and consultation mechanisms
created. In Haiti, while there were some stories of success, too often such instances were pat-
1400 16th Street, NW
chwork and lacked sufficient follow-through. In general, the first weeks and months of the crisis
Suite 210
Washington, DC 20036 were a period of missed opportunity.
202.667.8227

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What went right:
High level of awareness about GBV: Thanks to
numerous advocacy efforts, information about vi-
olence against women and girls and the need to ad-
dress protection issues was disseminated early on in
the response. The GBV Area of Responsibility work-
ing group sent action sheets to all clusters on how to
meet minimum GBV standards across sectors, and
many situation reports mentioned risks to women and
girls and reports of violence. This is good practice that
should be built upon by ensuring that GBV standards
are not only known but monitored, and that protection
risks noted in reports are swiftly acted upon.
Some efforts made to target women and girls:
While minimum standards were frequently unmet, in
many instances organizations recognized the need to
reach out to women and girls and target them directly
in their assistance efforts. For example, reproductive
health and sanitary kits were made available and in-
corporated in some NGOs distributions, a number of
camp committees were asked to include women and
girls, and food distributions were targeted directly to
women. Such efforts could be strengthened in future
emergencies by ensuring that attention to women‟s
and girls‟ specific needs is uniform across the humani-
tarian response. Additionally, it is important to develop
measures that guarantee women‟s protection beyond
points of distribution to ensure that women feel safe to
participate and to hold onto assistance they receive.
What went wrong:
Inconsistent leadership of and resources for GBV
coordination: While the GBV sub-cluster was acti-
vated immediately following the earthquake, effective
prevention and response efforts were hindered by ro-
tating sub-cluster leadership, insufficient staffing and
resourcing of GBV coordination, and leader-
ship/capacity problems within the protection cluster. In
the first two months, the sub-cluster had three different
GBV coordinators and little to no support staff or re-
sources. While coordination funding was requested in
the Flash Appeal, this left the GBV sub-cluster without
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sufficient resources in the first weeks of the emergen-
cy. This made it difficult to meet immediate needs of
women and girls for basic services, to establish a
strategy for the group, and to harness the diverse ex-
pertise of NGOs into coherent action.
In particular, the sub-cluster wasn‟t able to draw in lo-
cal women‟s groups and bridge the gap between
emergency responders and development agencies
with a pre-existing presence in Haiti. Furthermore, as
assessments and funding appeals were developed,
the absence of consistent leadership meant that there
was no forceful advocate to ensure that GBV issues
were prioritized in the initial response. Finally, GBV is
a core protection concern and responsibility for ensur-
ing it is swiftly addressed is the responsibility of the
protection cluster, which in Haiti is led by the Office of
the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
OHCHR‟s lack of operational protection experience in
natural disasters affected the quality of the response.
Insufficient action across clusters to integrate pro-
tection and GBV concerns: Weaknesses in integrat-
ing protection concerns became evident as the first
wave of assistance projects failed to consistently meet
minimum GBV standards. Latrines often lacked locks
and were not properly separated, shelter materials
were inadequate and/or not reaching women and
girls, lighting was insufficient, and food distributions did
not adequately address protection concerns for wom-
en recipients. Most importantly, basic health and psy-
chosocial support for GBV survivors were critically
scarce. While GBV action sheets had been distributed
across clusters, cluster leads were unable to operatio-
nalize this information and uphold basic standards in
their respective sectors.
Lack of involvement of Haitian groups: Internation-
al actors failed to take advantage of the presence of
Haitian groups and build upon and strengthen existing
local capacity. Women‟s groups were marginalized
from relief efforts and planning and repeatedly voiced
concerns about their exclusion. As community-based
organizations increasingly mobilized to assist survi-
vors locally, international agencies did not provide
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them with material and technical support, missing an
opportunity to fill a critical gap in GBV services and
support sustainable programming.
Insecurity in displacement sites increased wom-
en’s and girls’ vulnerability to violence: Women
and girls were insecure in many of the overcrowded
displacement camps and in certain areas of Port-au-
Prince. They faced daily harassment, threats and a
lack of privacy that made them acutely vulnerable to
violence. Reports of sexual and physical violence
arose within days, pointing to an urgent need for a
scaled up security response. While some patrols were
eventually organized, they were far from sufficient to
meet the vast need.
The weak coordination between MINUSTAH, the
Haitian National Police, and local organizations,
including camp committees, and the absence of a
comprehensive security plan, led to insufficient action
to improve women‟s and girls‟ safety.
NGOs prioritized sectoral responses (such as
shelter, food, water and sanitation and non-food
item distribution) over protection, and many did not
have the capacity to integrate protection concerns into
their existing work. Few NGOs had dedicated GBV or
protection staff and many didn‟t include GBV preven-
tion and response initiatives as part of their initial dis-
aster response.
Lessons
Despite the uniqueness of the scale and impact of the
earthquake, many important lessons can be gathered from
the mistakes made, the good initiatives started but not suf-
ficiently supported, and the outcome of attempts to make
mid-course corrections.
Coordination:
GBV coordination requires expertise, resources
and dedicated staff: Without a full-time, experienced
GBV coordinator and accompanying support staff, a
GBV sub-cluster will not be able to meet its minimum
obligations for response. Too often, GBV coordination
in Haiti was hindered as staff had both programmatic
and agency responsibilities and were not able to fully
focus on coordination. In Haiti, the working groups and
clusters that performed well were those with expe-
rienced dedicated staff. The health cluster, for in-
stance, was staffed early on with a multi-lingual team,
including an information officer, to implement coordi-
nation functions. Even within the GBV sub-cluster, it
was only with the arrival of a full-time coordinator
(three months in) that the sub-cluster was able to ac-
complish key tasks such as establishing viable referral
mechanisms, organizing smaller working groups, en-
gaging the security sector, and distributing community
awareness messages.
Messages aren’t enough: Better training on GBV
and protection issues for cluster leads before an
emergency will strengthen prevention and response
efforts across sectors when a crisis arises. Though
GBV action sheets can be a useful resource during a
disaster, if cluster leads have no prior exposure to the
issue and there are no staff with GBV expertise, there
will be little operationalization of messages provided.
Food distributions are a case in point. With more train-
ing and guidance from GBV technical experts, the
good work done in targeting women could have been
followed through better with pre- and post-distribution
consultations and monitoring to ensure that women
were able to safely participate in distributions and hold
onto the materials they were given.
Commitment to addressing GBV must come from
the top: When the leadership of the UN country team
prioritizes GBV and protection, there is enhanced ac-
countability to minimum standards across the humani-
tarian response. A GBV coordinator is critical to pro-
viding expertise and support across sectors, but a
sub-cluster coordinator cannot enforce standards. Si-
milarly, the critical issue of prevention of sexual exploi-
tation and abuse by humanitarian personnel was not
embraced at the highest levels and thus was entirely
uncoordinated in the early months of response. Un-
less cluster leads and heads of agency are held ac-
countable to addressing GBV by the UN country team
and the humanitarian coordinator, they are unlikely to
prioritize it.
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 Training is an important but often overlooked re-
sponsibility of the GBV sub-cluster: It is not un-
usual for the location of a humanitarian crisis to be one
where GBV prevention and response systems are al-
ready weak. The onset of a disaster only weakens ex-
isting systems and makes women and girls more vul-
nerable. These factors point to the need for the coor-
dination of training on GBV, especially for host country
workers to ensure sustainability of GBV response, but
also for emergency responders from other sectors to
better integrate GBV concerns into their own work.
Security/Protection:
A lack of women’s visible insecurity should not
mask their vulnerability to violence in less public
places: Concerns over looting, riots and widespread
panic were the focus of initial security efforts in Haiti.
Overlooked was the fact that women and girls were at
extreme risk of physical and sexual violence in their
tents, inside displacement camps, and in less public
places. Security efforts failed to address this insecurity
and women and girls were left exposed.
Security on the perimeter of a settlement will do
little to address insecurity inside the settlement:
While police or UN forces were sometimes deployed
to the outskirts of displacement sites, it took many
weeks before patrols inside camps were organized or
security plans developed to enhance security in the
places where women and girls were most vulnerable.
Even as the security response increased, women
were not sufficiently consulted to ensure initiatives
were tailored to their specific concerns, particularly
addressing their distrust of police and security commit-
tees.
Women’s exposure to violence can be reduced if
preventive protection measures are taken across
sectors: Much can be done to enhance women‟s and
girls‟ safety in the absence of a formal security pres-
ence. In Haiti, women and girls were put at risk be-
cause of overcrowding in camps, ill-lit, unlocked la-
trines, a lack of lighting in strategic places, and an ina-
bility to access basic goods, which increased the
threat of exploitation. These are known vulnerabilities
that have been documented in multiple disasters and
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can be mitigated through integrating basic protection
measures in response efforts.
Without camp management structures, it is more
difficult to resolve protection issues: In Haiti, many
of the failures to sufficiently integrate protection were
exacerbated by the absence of camp management in
many sites. Camp management provides a critical
focal point to resolve protection issues. Due to its li-
mited experience in humanitarian practice beyond ref-
ugee movement and resettlement and return pro-
gramming, the International Organization for Migration
(IOM) was not able to use its leadership position to re-
solve these problems. Additionally, NGOs were reluc-
tant to take responsibility for camp management be-
cause of the sheer number of sites as well as con-
cerns over their capacity to effectively take on this role.
Strong collaboration with communities is essen-
tial to improving women’s and girls’ safety when
security structures have been weakened: Informal
committees can play an important role in enhancing
security, but only if such structures are effective and
accountable and women and girls are represented
and their specific safety concerns addressed.
GBV prevention and response:
If services for survivors are not available, violence
against women and girls will not be reported and
therefore may go unacknowledged: Too often, hu-
manitarian actors wait for reports of GBV before act-
ing. Yet, women and girls will not seek assistance if no
assistance is available. Health, psychosocial and safe-
ty services and community-level support for survivors
must be a part of the initial emergency response.
GBV prevention and response require targeted
efforts: While mainstreaming is critical, mainstream-
ing alone is insufficient to respond to GBV. Without
dedicated expertise and stand-alone programs, GBV
is likely to be addressed in a scattershot approach in-
stead of comprehensively. Stand-alone GBV pro-
grams and dedicated staff can ensure that a multi-
sectoral plan to holistically address survivors‟ needs is
in place, contributing to knowledge transfer across
sectors, thereby enhancing mainstreaming efforts.
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Donors must hold humanitarian organizations
and UN agencies accountable for addressing
GBV: Donors must take a more proactive role in en-
suring that GBV is addressed in natural disasters.
With competing priorities, GBV frequently falls to the
bottom of the list. This creates a vicious cycle where
NGOs don‟t invest in GBV expertise because they
cannot obtain funding for it and donors don‟t fund
NGOs for GBV programs because so few have the
necessary technical expertise. While humanitarian
agencies are responsible for addressing GBV, donors
can be an important voice for accountability by rein-
forcing those responsibilities and providing the re-
sources necessary to fulfill them.
Continuing Challenges
Ten months after the earthquake, progress has been slow
and emergency needs are still present. At the same time,
not enough has been done to ensure that women‟s protec-
tion concerns are sustainably addressed in longer-term
construction efforts. As the Haitian government and the
humanitarian community seek to “build Haiti back better,”
there is a danger that the status quo of discrimination and
unequal opportunity will persist for women and girls.
Services for survivors of GBV remain insufficient,
particularly at the community level and outside Port-
au-Prince. Mental health services are extremely li-
mited, women‟s organizations are overwhelmed, and
the police and judicial systems are not viable re-
courses for most survivors. At the community level,
some groups have mobilized to work with survivors
but they are too few and receive too little support. In
general, the existing network of support is stretched
thin, unable to effectively cover the large geographic
area that was affected by the disaster. Services out-
side of the capital remain insufficient and are also fur-
ther strained by those who fled the earthquake-
affected areas.
Protection concerns have been better addressed
in some of the new settlements, but insecurity in
many areas of Port–au-Prince is worsening,
crowding in camps has not been alleviated, and the
security presence remains minimal. As people are en-
couraged to move back to their communities, insecuri-
ty in their home neighborhoods will prove to be a dis-
incentive.
There are not enough NGOs and agencies work-
ing on GBV to meet the scale of need. Few organi-
zations prioritize GBV in their emergency response or
invest in developing internal GBV capacity, so when
emergencies arise there is not enough surge capacity
to meet crisis needs. Unlike long-established sectors
where technical capacity is widespread, such as
health or shelter, in general there is a shortage of GBV
expertise across the humanitarian community, making
it all the more difficult to ensure protection issues are
addressed in large-scale disasters.
The border areas have been largely neglected,
despite the movement of displaced populations to the
Dominican Republic and the risk to women of traffick-
ing and violence. At the outset of the crisis, coordina-
tion of this region was led from Santo Domingo, but
soon coordination responsibilities were transferred to
Port-au-Prince causing much confusion for NGOs on
where to seek guidance and support.
There is little preparation to anticipate protection
needs in future disasters. Natural disasters are re-
current features of Haitian life, yet little is being done
now to address women‟s and girls‟ vulnerability so
they are not so at risk when the next crisis hits. Nor is
there adequate preparation to ensure that future
emergency responses are better able to address GBV
from the outset.
Long-term reconstruction plans fail to include
women’s and girls’ needs, missing a critical chance
to invest in their futures, and in turn the development
of Haiti in general. In the Government of Haiti‟s Post-
Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) and subsequent
Action Plan, gender is treated peripherally, rather than
as an area of need that warrants specific attention and
investment. Although in places, the PDNA highlights
the importance of women‟s involvement in reconstruc-
tion – the role of the Ministry of Women‟s Affairs, and
the health, education and economic needs of women
– few resources or actions have actually been commit-
ted to meet those areas.
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 To the extent that GBV and protection have been
mainstreamed, little follow-up monitoring has oc-
curred to ensure that these components have
been implemented and are having an impact.
Recommendations on Improving the
Response in Haiti
Address protection concerns before they worsen.
The Protection Cluster – in consultation with the GBV
sub-cluster, MINUSTAH, women‟s groups and the
government of Haiti – must develop and implement a
comprehensive protection strategy, including a tar-
geted security plan, to enhance women‟s and girls‟
safety. In addition, protection issues must be better
addressed across sectors, while heads of UN agen-
cies, cluster leads and the humanitarian coordinator
must make it a priority to uphold accountability to min-
imum GBV standards. The Interim Haiti Recovery
Commission (IHRC) must also commit to ensuring
that protection issues are addressed in the projects
they review.
Scale up efforts to expand services for survivors
immediately. Donors, NGOs, and Haitian organiza-
tions must commit to expanding GBV prevention and
response efforts so that survivors get the assistance
that they need.
o NGOs must strengthen their GBV capacity and
prioritize GBV in their response efforts.
o Donors must develop a proactive strategy for ad-
dressing GBV in Haiti and resource it properly.
o Haitian women‟s organizations must be brought
together with community-based groups to build
upon past work to develop a plan of action to
comprehensively address GBV that is fully inclu-
sive of the social and economic diversity of the
population.
Integrate protection and GBV into disaster risk
reduction strategies and pre-emergency planning.
Experience in Haiti has illustrated that distribution of
GBV guidance at the onset of an emergency has little
traction if emergency responders are not already fa-
miliar with the principles of GBV prevention and re-
6
sponse. Skill sets must be built and strategies put in
place as a general rule of risk reduction and emergen-
cy planning in all sectors to make them a matter of
course in the next emergency.
Advance women’s and girls’ economic and social
empowerment in reconstruction efforts. Donors,
the Haitian government and NGOs must recognize
and take action to redress the absence of women and
girls in reconstruction and development plans. Raising
the status of women and girls and ensuring they have
viable educational and economic opportunities are crit-
ical to preventing gender-based violence. Priority
areas include:
o Support women‟s groups at all levels of Haitian
society and ensure that they have a voice in re-
construction.
o Adopt the Gender Shadow Report‟s recommen-
dation to “facilitate a „surge‟ in women‟s participa-
tion and gender expertise in all relevant recon-
struction processes, including the national steer-
ing committee and other relevant regional and in-
ternational processes.” The IHRC, in particular,
must better engage women‟s groups in their work,
prioritize projects to promote women‟s empower-
ment and monitor reconstruction efforts to ensure
that they benefit women equally.
o Develop and implement a plan to economically
empower women.
o Support specific initiatives for girls‟ education.
Build the capacity of the Haitian government to
address GBV.
o Reconstitute and build the capacity of the Concer-
tation Nationale so that it can lead coordinated ac-
tion across the Haitian government, donors and
civil society to address GBV.
o Ensure that the National Action Plan to Fight Vi-
olence Against Women and Girls remains com-
prehensive enough to meet the scale of need
post-quake or update it accordingly.
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o Support the Ministry of Women‟s Affairs to take a
leading role in addressing GBV and ensure that
all relevant ministries are fulfilling their responsi-
bilities under the National Action Plan.
o Reconstitute the special unit within the Haitian
National Police dedicated to working with women
and girls. Train police officers to appropriately as-
sist GBV survivors, support recruitment of female
officers and strengthen legal systems to end im-
punity for perpetrators of sexual violence.
Recommendations on Strengthening GBV
Efforts in Natural Disasters Globally:
Early Action As the Key to Prevention
GBV must be recognized as an urgent, lifesaving concern
in natural disasters and addressed as a core element of
emergency and disaster response with human, technical,
material and financial resources dedicated to it in the first
days of an emergency.
UN agencies must:
Develop a roster of GBV experts who can be dep-
loyed within 48 hours of an emergency to lead GBV
coordination.
Ensure that GBV coordinators are dedicated full-time
to coordination responsibilities and have the neces-
sary support staff and resources. Do not wait for a
Flash Appeal to provide coordination funding. Ensure
funding is available immediately.
Develop strategies for GBV prevention and response
that reflect IASC Guidelines.
Develop internal capacity by increasing the number of
GBV staff (in headquarters, regionally and in-country),
developing and conducting trainings, and investing in
resources for GBV programs and coordination. En-
sure that there are GBV staff in senior-level positions
and that responsibility for addressing GBV is taken on
at the highest levels within agencies and within the UN
country team.
Include GBV prevention and response in disaster pre-
paredness planning and training.
The U.S. government must:
Increase the number of GBV technical staff within
OFDA. Ensure that at least one GBV specialist is dep-
loyed as part of Disaster Assistance Response
Teams.
Provide more funding for both standalone and main-
streamed GBV programs and track the funding that is
going specifically to GBV. Ensure GBV programs are
included in the first round of funding following an
emergency.
Ensure that all grantees adhere to minimum standards
on GBV prevention and response and monitor com-
pliance.
Develop a comprehensive GBV prevention and re-
sponse strategy for U.S. assistance programs.
The NGO community must:
Commit to dedicating internal resources to filling the
gap in GBV expertise within the humanitarian com-
munity. Special attention should be given to increasing
the number of aid and relief workers with GBV exper-
tise.
Recognize GBV as a first-tier concern in emergencies,
dedicate staff to addressing it, and develop programs
for prevention and response at the outset of a crisis.
Train staff on the IASC GBV Guidelines and ensure
that all sectoral projects adhere to them.
Ensure that specific efforts are made to fully engage
women and girls in the design, implementation and
monitoring of programs. Ensure equal participation of
women on community committees and that women
benefit equally from assistance projects.