Gender-responsiveness of InsuResilience programmes

The InsuResilience Global Partnership (IGP) for Climate and Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance (CDRFI), formed in 2017, aims to ‘strengthen the resilience of developing countries and to protect the lives and livelihoods of poor and vulnerable people from the impacts of climate shocks and disasters’ as part of its Vision 2025. The IGP aims to enable a scale-up in the use of CDRFI solutions and approaches by low-income countries, ultimately contributing to strengthening resilience by enabling faster, more reliable and cost-effective responses to disasters. The IPG uses its convening power to establish a common agenda and standards among its diverse membership of countries, experts and practitioners. 

Challenges

Women and men face the same climate-related hazards, but often face very different risks and impacts. In many cases, these differential risks and impacts are connected to women’s roles in supply and value chains, their labour profiles, household responsibilities, and decision-making power. Women often have additional vulnerabilities, are more exposed, or have lesser adaptive and coping capacities due to access barriers, sociocultural differences, and other gender-specific challenges and constraints. They thus have different and greater needs for protection. Without identifying and incorporating gender-specific needs, vulnerabilities, challenges, constraints, capacities, and contributions, CDRFI mechanisms cannot reach their intended beneficiaries in an effective, inclusive, and equitable manner. In a worst case, they may entrench existing structural inequalities.

In light of the above, the IGP has prioritised gender as a key crosscutting objective as expressed in the InsuResilience Vision 2025 and has undertaken a range of important actions – including endorsing a Declaration on Gender, comprising gender-responsive programmes in the IGP Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) framework, establishing a Gender Working Group, and launching the InsuResilience Centre of Excellence on Gender-smart Solutions (CoE) at COP26.

Our approach

We designed and implemented a mixed-method study on the gender-responsiveness of the programmes and projects under the IGP, using programme documentation and Key Informant Interviews. The study investigated the extent to which the policy commitment at the IGP level is realised at programme level. This is measured against the IGP M&E indicator on gender-responsiveness of CDRFI schemes. The latter consists of a set of eight targets which support the identification of whether a scheme is gender responsive, divided by type of scheme (macro/meso/micro). The targets can be grouped into four key themes: (i) institutional commitment to gender responsiveness (in the form of policies and action plans), (ii) how gender is considered in design and implementation, (iii) who implements the programme and (iv) differentiated impacts of the coverage based on gender. 

A sample of four donors, 19 programmes and 23 projects were interviewed to assess their performance against the IGP gender targets, and to understand more fully the operational challenges they encounter, as well as documenting successes and best practices.

Outcomes

The programmes and projects surveyed for this report suggest that, collectively, the current status of gender-responsiveness under the IGP umbrella is low. Out of the eight IGP gender target components, six were only partly met, while two were not achieved at all. A small number of schemes were fully or mostly meeting targets, but this was not reflected in the average performance of the sampled programmes. See the figure here. 

We analysed the data collected and prepared a comprehensive report, including recommendations for the IGP, The Center of Excellence on Gender-Smart Solutions, IGP donors as well as programmes to design and implement gender-responsive programmes and projects and to monitor progress in an effective manner.

We also prepared a Policy Brief and presented the study results and recommendations to stakeholders.