Empowered Aid by Women's Protection and Empowerment

Since its magnitude first came to light in 2002, the aid community’s focus on addressing sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) has primarily rested on establishing reporting mechanisms and only recently shifted toward proactive measures to mitigate risk and prevent such abuses from occurring. In this episode, Alina Potts of the Global Women's Institute, Harriet Kolli of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) Uganda, and Loujine Fattal of CARE Lebanon, discuss Empowered Aid: Transforming gender and power dynamics in the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Empowered Aid is feminist, participatory action research that recognizes women and girls as contextual safeguarding experts and engages them as co-producers of knowledge, supported to safely take an active role in asking and answering questions about their own lives. It first examines the mechanisms through which material aid (i.e. food and non-food items) is delivered, and how these processes might inadvertently increase risks of SEA. The second phase builds upon this to create or adapt aid delivery models that actively work to reduce power disparities and give women and girls a sustained voice in how aid is delivered. Empowered Aid is led by the Global Women's Institute at George Washington University, and the first phase is conducted in partnership with CARE in Lebanon and the IRC in Uganda.

For more information on Empowered Aid, contact:

Alina Potts, Principal Investigator & Project Lead: apotts@gwu.edu
Harriet Kolli, Research Manager in Uganda: harriet.kolli@rescue.org
Loujine Fattal, Research Manager in Lebanon: loujinefattal@careliban.org

A dedicated page is coming soon to GWI's website, where you can find Empowered Aid resources, tools and updates: https://globalwomensinstitute.gwu.edu/