Today we will be speaking to two incredible guests who are here to represent and in their own right and expertise the Global ‘Gender and Covid19 Working Group’, which brings together academics from around the world, who conduct real time gender analysis to identify and document the gendered dynamics of COVID-19 and gaps in preparedness and response. Wow, this is possibly the most relevant interview and one which we are super, super excited about.
There has been a lot of misinformation and nervousness around covid’s impact on women from care, to treatment, to humanitarian intervention, to covid actually effecting our path to equality, by slowing it down, Our two experts representing this global working group will be able to help us make sense of it all.
Anne Ngunjiri, Senior Technical Advisor for Gender Based Violence, and Violence against Children Programs, LVCT Health in Nairobi, Kenya. In the Gender-COVID working group, Anne’s role is to conduct interviews with the marginalized population of women in urban informal settlement to better understand the secondary effects COVID has had on their lives, specifically health, social and economic wellbeing. The intention with the data generated is to disseminate to policy and decision makers to better inform their gender responsive plans at county and national level across relevant ministries, departments and agencies.
Clare Wenham, Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Clare specialises in global health security and the politics and policy of pandemic preparedness and outbreak response, through analysis of influenza, Ebola and Zika. Her work considers global health governance, role of WHO, national priorities and innovative financing for pandemic control, particularly in Latin America.
More recently she has been analysing the downstream effects of global health security policy on women, with a forthcoming Oxford University Press book offering a feminist critique of the Zika outbreak, and co-founding and co-leading the Gender&COVID project and working group. Her work features in The Lancet, British Medical Journal (BMJ), Security Dialogue, International Affairs, BMJ Global Health and Third World Quarterly. She previously worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, delivering projects relating to surveillance and transmission of infectious disease.
Find their work:
The Gender & Covid-19 Working Group website