Strengthening the Resilience of Syrian Women Girls and Host Communities
For more information about UN Women’s Gender Sensitive Refugee Response in Turkey, check out the comprehensive programme brief here.
UN Women is working to strengthen the resilience of refugee and host community women and girls and their access to opportunities, rights, and services, as required by international treaties and national legislation. Through the projects financed by the European Union, Government of Japan and Government of Iceland, since 2017 more than 10,000 refugee and host community women and girls benefited from gender-sensitive refugee response services including protection, access to livelihood opportunities and more than 4,000 women and girls participated in activities and events fostering social cohesion.
UN Women’s Refugee Response Programme consists of holistic multi-stakeholder projects implemented in partnership with Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality, Southeastern Anatolia Project Regional Development Administration, International Labour Organization, Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants, Refugee Support Center as well as other local and international civil society organizations.
Within the framework of the programme, women-only centers operate in Gaziantep and İzmir, providing outreach, psychosocial support, social/health/education/legal counselling, referrals to public and other services, childcare, basic skills and vocational skills trainings, Turkish language training, and conversation clubs in a protected space for the benefit of at-risk women with little or no access to existing services. Multi-purpose Community Centers and Youth Centers in Şanlıurfa are supported with enhanced protection service delivery capacity for reaching out to more refugee and host community women. The programme also reaches men and boys to engage them in the support for gender equality and women’s empowerment through meetings within the local communities with facilitated discussions on women’s participation in economic life, father-children cooking workshops and social activities where men and boys are provided with messages on gender equality.
The programme helps enhance the capacities of the first-line responders working in the field, and for the design and implementation of refugee response interventions at CSOs, UN agencies and local authorities and government institutions through gender sensitive refugee response trainings developed based on the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Gender Handbook and local practices. In addition, UN Women carries out capacity building and mentoring programmes targeting women-led organizations. As an important component of the programme, UN Women also supports the amplification of refugee and host community women’s voices in decision-making and advocacy platforms by providing leadership trainings to grassroots refugee women’s groups and directly engaging them in international events as speakers and influencers.