CARE's Strategy on Humanitarian Action and Gender

What does CARE’s strategy call for?

CARE’s humanitarian work is guided by the CARE Program Strategy Humanitarian and Emergency Strategy, that strongly reinforces the focus on gender equality in humanitarian preparedness and response. The goal of the Humanitarian Strategy is to: be a leading humanitarian agency known for our particular expertise to consistently reach and empower women and girls affected by humanitarian crises.

The Gender Equality and Women’s Voice Guidance Note further guides the practical application of the gender goals of the Program Strategy.

All CARE country offices and staff must comply with a number of policies put in place to ensure protection of women's and men's rights, including:

• CARE Programming Principles: which guide CARE’s ways of working that align toward its vision and mission, including working against discrimination and violence, toward empowerment and accountability.
• CARE member gender policies and codes of conduct, such as the CI Gender Policy, which makes explicit CARE’s commitments to support gender equality.
• CARE Humanitarian Mandate and Humanitarian Accountability Framework, which serve to meet immediate needs of disaster-affected populations (disaggregated by gender), in a way that also addresses underlying causes of people’s vulnerability, including gender discrimination, and
• Various international principles and codes of conduct (for example, IFRC Code of Conduct, HAP-I, People in Aid). Refer also to sections in the CARE Emergency Toolkit: Chapter 2 Humanitarian policy framework, and Chapter 6 Quality and accountability.

CARE has a number of tools and processes to help teams to integrate gender effectively into their humanitarian work.

The CARE Emergency Toolkit, open and accessible online, provides comprehensive guidance and links to all of the relevant tools and information to taking a gender in emergencies approach.

The key steps to guide gender integration into CARE’s humanitarian work (outlined in detail in the Emergency Toolkit) are:

1. Rapid gender analysis
2. Gender mainstreaming and gender specific programming
3. Women’s participation and leadership
4. Gender and monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (MEAL)
5. Gender and emergency preparedness planning
6. Gender and human resources

The Gender in Emergencies Wiki page provides updated information on key learning, tools, and information emerging from the Gender in Emergencies approach. This includes links to the Gender in Emergencies (GiE) Guidance Note Series, which offers a set of simple, user-friendly, short documents that can be used to provide practical guidance on key processes and approaches to further CARE’s Gender Equality mandate, and span: action planning, gender analysis, preparedness, recruitment, partnerships and monitoring/assessment.

For further support, guidance, or questions regarding the GiE approach, please contact the GiE team at: emergencygender@careinternational.org.

 

Gender in Emergencies Key Practices