Humanitarian Response

During the aftermath of disaster, there is an essential need of gender sensitive responses with consideration to the diversity of women and their diverse needs. The objective of the gender sensitive response campaign is to be with women and support them with love and compassion, hence the organization calls its initiative Sneha Campaign ('Sneha' meaning love and compassion). The campaign prioritizes the need of the women and adolescent girls in the most difficult situation.

We respond to disasters with the theme “relief with dignity”. As an organization working for women’s empowerment and their well-being, WOREC recognizes that psychosocial support is one of the key elements to consider even while distributing relief materials to women. For us, it was imperative to make women feel that they are not alone. Standing together with woman in need and making her feel that she and her family are not alone is very important.

Evolving through the time, our relief activities provided services to women and adolescent girls through safe spaces, provided psycho-social counseling to the survivors, supported the survivors on need-based approach and facilitated capacity building to women through orientations, developed feminist leadership and human resources on different issues like GBV, health and hygiene during menstruation, sexual and reproductive health among others.

Our intervention is focused on specific need of survivor so that they can recover themselves as fast as possible. Hence, we focus on providing environment and space to express themselves necessary for recovery and resilience building. Apart from providing services and safe spaces, empowerment component is built within which have shown that survivors’ resilience and recovery power have increased so far in our findings.

WOREC responded to Koshi flood in 2008, and in events of other natural disasters after that including floods in Terai, Nepal earthquake 2015 and COVID-19 pandemic situation.

Gender sensitive guideline was prepared during Nepal earthquake 2015 to regulate women friendly space known as Sneha Centre (Sneha means love and compassion) which was operated by WOREC and NAWHRD. The guideline was forwarded to chief secretary of the country with request to adapt this within government relief programs.

During Koshi flood in 2008, WOREC urged to Government of Nepal that structures and services needs to be gender sensitive and accessible to target groups and community, for instance women friendly toilets in the temporary shelters.