UN Women Newsletter - Issue 1

COVID-19 Special Edition

We are launching our first newsletter at one of the most difficult times in modern history. COVID-19 continues to spread across Afghanistan, and the globe. This is not just a health crisis. It shocks our societies and economies. It threatens our future, and it exposes how unequal we really are. Yet for us at UN Women Afghanistan, COVID-19has also confirmed one of our strong beliefs– that we are relevant as long as we serve the communities we are meant to serve, as long as we are there where Afghan women need us to be. Lockdown and travel restrictions prevented us from being in physical proximity, but it did not prevent us from being connected more than ever. Looking back at the last three months, we have come a long way. We provided personal protective equipment to women seeking shelter from abuse at home, released COVID 19 protocols for Women Protection Centres and Family Guidance Centres to ensure they can continue to provide critical services safely, and launched a COVID 19 call for ideas, offering grants of up to $2,000 for community-led initiatives that support women and girls across Afghanistan. We released a series of gender alerts that highlight the gender specific impacts of COVID-19 in Afghanistan, from the lack of services for survivors of violence to the challenges of building peace during a health crisis and a fast-paced rise in the burden of unpaid care work. We talked with Afghan and international experts about the pains and gains that Afghan women have experienced over the last two decades, we engaged daily with the women we serve, hosting daily calls with activists and partners across Afghanistan to hear directly from them on how COVID 19 is impacting on their lives and their constituencies and launched COVID 19 information campaigns. This is in addition to our ongoing normative, coordination and programming work to serve the women and girls of Afghanistan. Our journey continues and we will not give up -- on gender equality, on women’s rights, on Afghanistan.

In solidarity,