Source: IRIN news
The Norwegian Refugee Council’s first ever female only intervention team, which the NGO believes is also the only such entity in the country, works around shelter issues, the women are tasked with aiding female-headed households in one particular region of the capital Kabul. Until last year it was all-male team. This affected how much contact the NGO had with women in the communities. Since the head of the communities are usually male they introduce only the vulnerable males to NGO.
The number of female beneficiaries was very low earlier. The women had to go through a middle man and sometimes they were charged but now they contact directly and can benefit without charges or bribery. Among the many services NRC provides is helping women register for national identity cards. Up to 90 percent of women in the informal settlements of Kabul don’t have ID cards – and that means they can’t formally rent a house, open a bank account, inherit money or vote. The five women in NRC come from different parts of Afghanistan’s tribal society, yet the experience has bonded them together. They have built confidence in women – even among themselves.
At the beginning when they were going to the villages and selecting the female-headed households they were not sure the women could build their shelters. But when resources, cash were provided, women showed they could handle it, now both of them are confident about it. Fourteen years after the US-led invasion, a woman’s place in Afghanistan is still largely indoors and out of sight. The Afghanistan National Nutrition Survey released in 2013 found that 95 percent of Afghan women aged 15-49 suffer from Vitamin D deficiency due largely to their lack of exposure to the sun. Only 16 percent of Afghan women have formal jobs, according to the World Bank, and a survey last year noted a lack of job opportunities was the second highest issue behind education for women in the country. Foreign NGOs and UN organizations, most of which have explicitly committed to the UN Women’s gender mainstreaming policy as well as equal opportunity legislation in their countries of origin, are among some of the more open organizations in terms of employing women, but they still fall far short of equal representation. UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) said it was just under 20 percent, NRC was 29 percent and M decins Sans Fronti res (MSF) was 36 percent.
Cathy Howard, acting head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), admitted that just 2 percent of their national staff were female, a figure she wants to change. In total OCHA has around 100 programming staff in Afghanistan, including international workers. Among the measures being discussed by OCHA is the lowering of entry requirements, so that candidates only need a bachelors, rather than a masters, for certain posts. Merely having equal opportunity policies are not enough. Afghan cultural norms remain an issue preventing female employment, with women often leaned upon by family and friends to abandon their work plans. The problem starts earlier than the job market – with women often not receiving the same level of education as men. Guilhem Molinie, head of mission at MSF, said that it was not impossible to find female candidates for specialist medical roles such as doctors and midwives, but challenging especially outside the capital Kabul.
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