Action Fund

Disasters, humanitarian crises, and conflicts have a disproportionate effect on women and girls. When a disaster, like a tsunami or earthquake, strikes, women are typically the first to respond, and are often affected more than men in the aftermath. Violence against women and girls increases during all emergencies, especially during times of conflict, and to make matters worse, women are often excluded from decision making processes and denied access to essential resources. The increased vulnerability that many women and girls face during emergencies is the direct result of the gender inequality and discrimination that women and girls experience in their daily lives, yet, women and women's organizations are significantly underrepresented in humanitarian response. That’s why, at the onset of a crisis or disaster, ActionAid does things differently. Our emergency response is guided by our Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA) and Humanitarian Signature – our federation-wide, nonnegotiable approach to humanitarian preparedness, response, and recovery which all humanitarian interventions must adhere to.

1. Shifting the Power: ActionAid’s presence and relationships with localorganizations in communities where we work are enhanced through our response, continually expanding on local capacity. We enable local leadership to design and implement programs, and support local leaders to access national funding and advocacy opportunities.
2. Women’s Leadership: We ensure power is shifted to women leaders in order to address existing power imbalances at all levels by promoting the leadership of women who are affected by the crisis. This means that we will focus on women’s rights programming, including protection programming, so that women have the space, and agency, to lead change processes.
3. Accountability to Affected Communities: Effective humanitarian response means that all stakeholders are accountable to affected communities. ActionAid works with communities and local organizations to support them to hold powerful decision makers to account, and to ensure that they are responding appropriately to the needs expressed by the communities themselves.
4. Sustainability and Resilience: Underlying the Humanitarian Signature, it is crucial to link emergency response to resilience-building and longer term sustainable change, including empowering individuals, training them to know and advocate for their rights, and addressing underlying inequalities through all of our programming.

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