By 2030, UN-Habitat estimates that 3 billion people, will need access to adequate housing. As a result of discrimination and inequality in housing, many women and girls live in insecure, undignified and unsafe conditions.
Through safe and decent shelter women have the opportunity to experience improved health, increased savings and opportunities for income-generation, and security. However, across the Asia Pacific, women are typically absent from decision-making around shelter and settlement planning and disaster risk reduction. As a result their interests are often poorly represented
Habitat for Humanity has been utilising a participatory process (called PASSA) in its housing and community resilience projects across Asia Pacific since 2013. PASSA encourages strong female participation in community-led identification of shelter vulnerabilities and solutions. We see an opportunity to further strengthen this through development of a specific gender module to enable facilitators to work with community members to more meaningfully consider gender and support positive gender outcomes.
The proposed project will develop and pilot a gender training and monitoring tool in Vietnam. Learning will support improved integration of gender considerations in Habitat’s programs across Asia Pacific.
Participatory Approach for Safe Shelter Awareness (PASSA) involves the active participation of communities in identifying and addressing their vulnerabilities in the context of housing and shelter. One of PASSA’s key strengths is that it empowers communities to take an active role in decision-making and PASSA is an excellent vehicle to encourage women’s participation. Habitat has identified potential entry points to ensure women can more fully and meaningfully take part in improving community resilience.
Expected outcomes:
1. 30 PASSA facilitators (20 women) have improved capacity to promote women’s meaningful participation in PASSA meetings and follow on activities.
By learning the additional PASSA module on gender equality and applying it in practice, facilitators will have awareness and skills to encourage more women to contribute more actively to and lead PASSA processes.
2.Two communities in Central and Northern Vietnam where pilot activities are implemented have improved gender equality.
This will be demonstrated through women’s increased agency and power in household and community level decision making and leadership of shelter and community resilience focused activities and planning.
Beyond these immediate outcomes, we expect wider adaptation and replication of the gender tools developed through this project across Habitat’s programs in the Asia Pacific. This would result in additional tens of thousands of community members benefitting from the work developed her
Monitoring data will be collected by project staff supported by a skilled gender advisor. Monitoring tools will include:
As this is a pilot project, a post-project review to reflect on successes, areas for improvement and to plan for scale up of the tools developed -including to other Habitat projects across Asia Pacific – will be conducted with local stakeholders.
Results of monitoring and lessons learnt workshop will be compiled as a report and shared across the Habitat network as well as with project supporters.
Habitat for Humanity Australia is an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International, an acclaimed global development organization that partners with a full range of stakeholders in more than 70 countries. We work with local communities, regional and national governments, peer organizations, and the private sector to remove the systemic barriers preventing low-income and historically underserved families from accessing adequate, affordable shelter.
Habitat’s work is based on the concept that a decent place to live is a foundation for poverty alleviation. Habitat works innovatively to build sustainable communities, and champion issues of sustainability, program quality, gender and social inclusion.
The gender lens makes perfect sense. It reflects the kind of due diligence framework I have observed time and again in the asset management world.
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