Empowered Aid: Building Safer Humanitarian Aid Delivery for Women and Girls
We make aid distribution safer by working to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse.
Women and girls know best what they need to mitigate their risk of violence. We use our research to learn what survivors want and need, and to understand how communities and governments can support survivors:
Empowered Aid works to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse in aid distribution. The goal is to develop humanitarian aid distribution models that reduce power disparities and give those most affected by abuse — refugee women and girls — a sustained voice in how aid is delivered.
Our research shows that humanitarian aid distribution is not a safe space for women and girls, but that there are solutions to prevent and mitigate harm.
- 73% of women respondents reported feeling fearful during the food distribution process.
Empowered Aid conducted participatory action research with women and girl refugees in Lebanon and Uganda to get their own recommendations for how aid distribution could be safer. This research found:
- Nearly half of all women respondents preferred to access services and report complaints at nongovernmental organizations specifically for women and girls.
- 53% of women respondents said sex-segregated lines at distribution points would make women and girls feel safer.
These ideas were then tested in small-scale pilots in ongoing humanitarian aid operations in Uganda and Lebanon. Empowered Aid is currently building on findings from these pilots to support aid actors in implementing scalable, evidence-based models for safer aid distribution. The Empowered Aid website features case studies from various countries, toolkits and guides for adapting Empowered Aid to your context, and other Empowered Aid resources.
The Empowered Aid team has also developed risk monitoring tools — such as safety audits, surveys and focus groups — that aid actors can use to proactively monitor for sexual exploitation and abuse, and a free, online Empowered Aid course was created to reach aid actors globally.
Global Women’s Institute leads Empowered Aid in partnership with local and international aid actors, as well as affected communities in refugee-hosting countries around the world.
Research from Empowered Aid
Empowered Aid’s Lebanon Results Report and Uganda Results Report: Findings from the Empowered Aid small-scale pilots conducted in Lebanon and Uganda
“Engaging Refugee Women and Girls as Experts”: A research article that discusses how Empowered Aid’s use of creative and participatory research methods helped address the barriers (such as illiteracy and lack of training) often cited as barriers limiting researchers’ ability to share power with affected communities
“Whose Voices Matter?”: A research paper that examines how using participatory, feminist and anthropological methods in gender-based violence research can hold researchers accountable in terms of both acknowledging and explicitly addressing power disparities between researchers, research participants and research users
Want more on responding to violence against women and girls?
- Learn how to partner with refugee women and girls to mitigate the risk of and prevent sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian aid delivery through our Empowered Aid program.
- Understand proxy indicators for assessing women’s risk of gender-based violence when receiving cash assistance in humanitarian settings like Iraq and Colombia.
- Check out barriers and new approaches that support survivors’ access to response services in humanitarian contexts, through our Putting Survivors at the Center project.
- Read about the intersection of gender-based violence and mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) for survivors through our work with Trōcaire.
Check out all of our research on our Explore page.
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