Gendered Impact of COVID19 on the Ground

In Asia and the Pacific, most marginalised individuals, groups and communities are bearing the hardest impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Women who depend on daily income are losing livelihoods across the region, facing increasing food insecurity and difficulties in accessing  public healthcare infrastructure due to lack of social protection and privatisation of public services. Public health systems across the region are under significant pressure, with many of them operating beyond capacity. Women healthcare workers are at a higher risk along with those in the service industry and  informal workforce. A trend seen across the region is that women and girls are facing increased burden of domestic responsibilities and unpaid care work in their homes and communities and patriarchal structures are being reinforced. At the same time, it has been reported that women and girls are also facing increased domestic violence, intimate partner violence and sexual abuse as a result of complying with social confinement measures.The pandemic has revealed glaring social and economic inequalities and highlighted how the current system of neoliberal capitalism has failed to deliver peoples’ basic needs, including access to quality public healthcare and universal social protection. Many governments’ response to these multiple, intersecting crises is to ‘build back better’, sometimes at the cost of the enjoyment of human rights, environment and climate crisis. Dominant narrative still continues to put forward market based solutions rather than challenge the structural inequality that the pandemic has exposed. At the same time, measures adopted by governments in the region to deal with the pandemic have included militaristic and authoritarian responses with crackdown on peoples’ movements, attack on women human rights defenders, arbitrary arrests, and extrajudicial killings. Despite multiple challenges, women are at the forefront to support communities demanding a feminist, rights-based response to the pandemic. With this fellowship, we see an urgent need to strengthen the gender analysis and impact of COVID-19 by starting a conversation in mainstream and alternative media. The media fellows will highlight the challenges that women are facing and gender-responsive solutions that  work for them and other marginalised communities. The media fellows will also be expected to critically examine policies regarding ‘build back better’ and other development agenda that further exacerbates development, human rights and climate crises in the region.