Voices from Cox’s Bazar - Binta Bajaha
Binta Bajaha, a Gender Programme Officer with the World Food Programme in Cox’s Bazar Bangladesh speaks about the impact of mainstreaming gender in the world’s largest refugee camp.
Before even knowing what feminism was about, I feel like I’ve always had a sense that the way the world functioned isn’t based on the laws of nature but on man-made reasoning that shapes culture and eventually becomes our reality.
You come to realize the expectations of women, men, boys and girls are very different, and things men and boys get away with, and what women and girls endure is simply incredible. Oddly enough, this pattern resonates throughout various cultures. A transformation in the normative social and cultural opinion of the abilities of women and girls has to occur at all levels, starting within the individual, the household, the community, the nation and then the globe.
Globally, gender parity on all matters is still a dream. Women are the producers of food and yet they consume less. They work more hours, yet they get paid less. If you want a world that is food secure, you need gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. Sustainable Development Goal (SGD) 2 entails ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture. SDG 5 outlines the achievement of gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls. In the end, I believe I will achieve my goal which is to prove the equation, SDG2 + SDG5 = zero hunger
As a child, I always felt that I’d be a humanitarian and work for the United Nations. I have always wondered what could make me a good humanitarian given the opportunity. Gender, to me, seemed to be one area that was broad enough to permeate all my core values, principles and interventions.
The Rohingya refugee crisis, like most crises in the world, has a distinctive gender pattern; with gender-based violence an unfortunate reality of the crisis. Men and boys have been targeted and killed as they crossed into Bangladesh while women and girls suffering sexual violence as they fled. We know that 80% of the refugee population are women and children and 16% of households are female headed. Negative coping mechanisms within the camps have lessened a bit from the influx but early child marriage and transactional sex, though under reported, are still serious risks and concerns we have.
In my work with the Rohingyas and the host community, I meet a lot of people with stories that help me retain the human connection I can relay back to senior management to ensure we have a gender transformative humanitarian intervention. It’s these stories of women and girls overcoming their personal struggles to create their own safe space that truly resonates with me.
WFP has stepped up and as the biggest UN agency and responsible for food, our gender strategy is linking food security to environmental sustainability to livelihoods cash-for- work projects, remembering to always offer an array of choices for the woman as they work in isolation or side by side with men. From a 65-year-old Rohingya grandmother laying bricks for a road being rehabilitated by WFP’s Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) projects, to a 17 year old Rohingya girl making beautifully crafted book covers for International Women’s Day, to an 18 year-old widow working with the interagency (WFP, UNHCR, IOM) engineering project SMEP, these stories all showcase how gender has permeated our response making it a gender transformative response.
The camp is a brutal equalizer, something I’m reminded of in my interactions with the Rohingya women, men, girls and boys. The humanitarian community needs to seize the moment and I think we have done well in centering gender within some aspects, but of course there is much more to do. We have women working in construction, people are talking about menstrual hygiene, men are talking about supporting women camp leaders, and some men are taking the lead in their children’s nutrition treatment. These things are happening every day in the camps.
My goal is to make sure that people always think about the equation SDG2 + SDG5 = zero hunger. I aspire to be more innovative and step outside the box to go places where we have never been before, and gender gives me that room to explore that. My time here in Cox’s Bazar is dedicated to getting people involved in this response — my colleagues within WFP, our partners with local and international NGOs, the Bangladeshi host community and the Rohingya community — to think about gender. I want there to be more gender champions to bring about a sustainable change. Let’s recruit gender champions from the ground up as well as the top down, because we can never achieve food security without gender equality and women’s empowerment.
There are more than 900,000 people living as refugees in Cox’s Bazar and WFP is providing life-saving assistance to more than 95% of them. You can support Rohingya refugees here.
Story written by Fariha Marjia
