This open source Google doc is collating resources on gender and COVID-19. The doc comprises short summaries of articles which are organised under themes including ‘data and resources’, ‘gender based violence’, ‘women’s contributions’, ‘women’s leadership’, ‘unpaid care work’, ‘PPE’, ‘gender transformative policy’ and ‘gender pay gap’.
Useful Resources
Gender-based violence prevention, risk mitigation and response during COVID-19
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: UNHCR, Geneva, March 2020
This briefing gives an overview of risks of gender-based violence (GBV) in the context of COVID-19. Confinement is expected to increase risks of intimate partner violence for displaced women and girls, worsened socio-economic situation exposes refugee women and girls to increased risks of sexual exploitation by community members and humanitarian workers and there will be challenges in access to regular GBV services. The briefing includes recommendations to mitigate risks and ensure access to GBV services. They include considering from the outset, the gendered impacts of COVID-19, considering the different physical, cultural, security and sanitary needs of women, men, boys and girls in quarantines, providing dignity kits to ensure menstrual health and consulting women and girls on preparedness plans and interventions. Programming through women-led organizations should be prioritised whenever feasible.
IHEA webinars on health economics and COVID-19
IHEA: Online, May 2020
iHEA runs a webinar series on a range of health economics topics, with a current emphasis on issues related to COVID-19 . The website provides a list and link to all upcoming webinars, with new webinar details being posted regularly. Several of these webinars will be held on a multilingual webinar platform to enable wider reach.
Managing the pregnant woman during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa: A clinical guide for health workers and clinical managers
Department of Health: Republic of South Africa, April 2020
These guidelines provide guidance to healthcare workers and managers for the management and treatment of pregnant women in the context of COVID-19, read in conjunction with current Maternal and Neonatal health Guidelines and Guidelines for Clinical Management of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 disease. The guidelines change as knowledge regarding strategies to address COVID- 19 develop globally and in South Africa and are updated regularly online.
Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) technical guidance
World Health Organisation: Geneva, January 2020
On 31 December 2019, WHO was alerted to several cases of pneumonia in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. The virus did not match any other known virus. This raised concern because when a virus is new, it is not known how it affects people. One week later, on 7 January, Chinese authorities confirmed that they had identified a new virus. The new virus is a coronavirus, which is a family of viruses that include the common cold, and viruses such as SARS and MERS. This new virus was temporarily named “2019-nCoV.” The World Health Organisation has released a number of guidelines aimed at preventing the spread and proliferation of the virus.
Rights for People, Rules for Corporations - #BindingTreaty
Democracy Centre: Film, December 2019
#COP25 can barely break into the news cycle - but the public is well aware by now that business-as-usual is not an option if ecological breakdown is to be averted and move to a fairer, safer and more peaceful ways of co-existing on the planet are to be found. Business-as-usual means maintaining trade rules and treaties that give corporations enormous power to endlessly extract natural resources; sacrificing communities and ecosystems in those places to feed rampant consumerism for the profit of a powerful minority. This film’s calls on us to reject business-as-usual and advocate for a #BindingTreaty on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights and are building solidarity across countries and movements to demand Rights for People, Rules for Corporations.
Tunatazama
An online network for Southern African Communities Living Near Mines
This website is a space for community activists living near mines in southern Africa to share information, resources and experiences. The countries currently participating in this project are: Lesotho, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mozambique and Tanzania. Activists in each country document problems they experience and events they participate in and share this on a WhatsApp group. These posts are then shared on this site in the respective country blogs. Each country, in addition, maintains their own country blog. Additionally, Activists can view the posts on a mobile app called “Action Voices” which can be downloaded on an Android phone from the Google Play store. The activities of this project are managed by the Bench Marks Foundation on behalf of regional organisations.
Crowdsourcing in Health and Health Research: A Practical Guide
WHO/TDR and SESH in collaboration with the Social Innovation in Health Initiative: WHO, Geneva, 2019
Crowdsourcing tools, such as challenge contests, are increasingly used to improve public health. Crowdsourcing is the process of having a large group, including experts and non-experts, solve a problem and then share the solution with the public. This guide provides practical advice on designing, implementing and evaluating crowdsourcing activities for health and health research – with descriptions and examples of contests collected through a challenge contest The guide includes: descriptions of and methods for challenge contests for health and health research; how to organize and evaluate contests; practical resources, such as a challenge contest checklist; case studies; and a table of commended challenge contests for health submitted through the report’s challenge contest in 2017. The report was developed by the Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health (SESH) and the TDR-supported Social Innovation in Health Initiative (SIHI).
The danger of a single story
Adichie C: TEDGlobal, 2009
In this TED talk, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie warns of ‘the danger of the single story’. She describes how impressionable and vulnerable people are in the face of a story, particularly as children. She notes that stories matter, but also that many stories matter and no single story can portray a reality. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
The toll of the cobalt mining industry on health and the environment
CBS News: March 6 2018
This CBS News video reports an investigation of child labour in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, revealing that tens of thousands of children are growing up without a childhood today – two years after a damning Amnesty report about human rights abuses in the cobalt trade was published. The Amnesty report first revealed that cobalt mined by children was ending up in products from prominent tech companies including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Samsung. According to the CDC, "chronic exposure to cobalt-containing hard metal (dust or fume) can result in a serious lung disease called 'hard metal lung disease'" – a kind of pneumoconiosis, meaning a lung disease caused by inhaling dust particles. Inhalation of cobalt particles can cause respiratory sensitization, asthma, decreased pulmonary function and shortness of breath, the CDC says. An estimated two-thirds of children in the region of the DRC that CBS News visited recently are not in school. They're working in mines instead. CBS News' Debora Patta spoke with an 11-year-old boy, Ziki Swaze, who has no idea how to read or write but is an expert in washing cobalt. Every evening, he returns home with a dollar or two to provide for his family.