A new UN report shows that women and girls are not receiving nearly enough medical and non-medical support to deal with gender-based violence because only a negligent 0.2% of total funding goes to dealing with gender-based violence
As the world marks 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence (25 November to 10 December), a new report shows that many countries across Africa are still dealing with the consequences rather than prevention of this type of violence.
The year 2022, was the deadliest for females around the world with nearly 89,000 women and girls killed in gender-related violence, the highest annual number recorded in the past two decades, according to a joint report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and UN Women.
The report "Gender-Related Killings of Women and Girls (Femicide /Feminicide) 2022", gives global estimates of female intimate partner/family-related homicides in 2022. It shows that globally, nearly 89,000 women and girls were killed intentionally in 2022, the highest yearly number recorded in the past two decades.
Moreover, while the overall number of homicides globally began to fall in 2022 after a spike in 2021, the number of female homicides are not decreasing.
"Most killings of women and girls are gender motivated. In 2022, around 48,800 women and girls world-wide were killed by their intimate partners or other family members. This means that, on average, more than 133 women or girls were killed every day by someone in their own family," says the report.
Limited funds
Yet, only 0.2% of global aid and development funding went to preventing and responding to the violence according to the report.
The report, an analysis by UN Women and partners on the state of funding for the prevention of gender-based violence against women and girls shows that between 2018 and 2023, donors invested on average, about $410 million annually in the prevention of gender-based violence, $2.06 billion in total in the time under review, against the total funding of $204 billion needed annually.
In 2021 alone, the report says, "$14.38 billion was spent on health, $10.12 billion on education, $1.84 billion on social protection and $4.14 billion on environment protection in aid and development.
Women and girls in humanitarian settings are the most affected by this dismal funding because this lack of financial support interferes with the prevention of violence and management of the consequences for affected women and girls who have suffered rape, beatings, forced marriage for young girls, human trafficking for sex work, and female genital mutilation.
In the DRC for example, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) told Africa Renewal that at least 70 women who are survivors of sexual assault present themselves at the health facility near the four camps that the international NGO has set up in Goma. This is a 15% per cent increase in reported cases.
MSF-France's Executive Director Claire Magone says the money available to them is spent on medical response dealing with the consequences of rape for services and medical interventions such as morning-after pills to prevent pregnancies; preventive treatment of sexually transmitted infections including HIV; and counselling to for the psychological trauma of rape. The rape response can also include surgery depending on the degree of injury.
MSF has reported similar concerns for Sudan and Chad. In some cases, women have reported having been raped more than once in a day.
Ms. Magone called for more funding from partners to offer this critical medical response, but also mental and psychosocial support like treatment and counselling for anxiety, depression, and insomnia.
UNICEF has also reported an increase in the number of women and children experiencing sexual assault in emergency settings.
The UN sexual and reproductive health agency, UNFPA, which co-ordinates the response to gender-based violence in over 30 emergency areas in the world, received only a fifth of the funding it needed to address gender-based violence in 2022.
Countries like Sudan, where violence included mass rapes which the United Nations labelled "extreme", 80% of the humanitarian response is unfunded, according to data from the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA).
The consequence is the deployment of less mobile clinics and essential staff such as midwives and counsellors, especially in the hard-to-reach areas.
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The decline in funding also affects the care given to children. Carole Ajema, a gender specialist at the John Hopkins Affiliate Jhpiego said; "Specialists and governments in sub-Saharan Africa did not have programmes for children because of the assumption that children will outgrow the assault; but children are affected by the challenges into their adulthood."
Ms. Ajema also noted that while health systems have recognised the public health threat that is gender-based violence, healthcare workers who respond to survivors are not trained in medical school on how to offer the service.
This lack of training contributes to low quality service provision for survivors of violence in medical dispensaries and health centres, which are often in rural areas.
The little funding available supports one-stop health centres which have become popular in Africa, but health specialists are concerned that the quality of care that these centres offer may not include all the essential services prescribed.
