Policy Brief:
Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic virus on women and teenagers
Introduction:
The COVID-19 pandemic virus is excavating pre-existing inequalities, revealing our weaknesses in social, political, and economic systems which in turn have devastating effects on women and teenagers. The spread of the pandemic has also limited progress made in past decades to be at risk.
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across every scope, from health to the economy, social protection to security, have intensified for women and girls merely by their sex:
Amalgamated economic collisions are felt specifically by women and girls who are mostly earning less, saving less, and holding insecure jobs or living close to poverty.
Although early reports divulge that more men are dying as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health of women is harmfully affected through the reallocation of resources and priorities envelope with sexual and reproductive health services. Unpaid care job has escalated, with children out-of-school, deepening care needs for older persons becoming completely overwhelmed for health facilities. As the COVID-19 pandemic excavates economic and social anxiety joined with regulated movement and social isolation procedures, gender-based violence is snowballing exponentially. Several women are being forced to lockdown at home with their abusers at the same time facilities to support survivors are being disrupted. Entirely these effects are further aggrandized in contexts of fragility, conflict, and tragedies, where social interconnection is already destabilized in institutional capacity and facilities are limited.
This policy brief concentrates on each of these problems, in turn, probing how women and girls’ lives are altering in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, and delineating suggested priority actions to convoy mutually speedy response and long-term recovery efforts.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not merely a challenge for global health schemes, nevertheless also an assessment of our human inner self. Recuperation must lead to a more equal world that is more resilient to future catastrophes. Fiscal incentive packages and emergency benchmarks to address public health gaps have been put in place in several countries to alleviate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic virus. All national rejoinders must place women and girls- their inclusion, rights, social-economic outcomes, representation, protection, and equality at the focus given they are to have the required impacts. This is not just as regards to amending long-standing inequalities nonetheless also about building a more fair and resilient world. The aforementioned is in the welfares of not only women and girls but also boys and men. Women will be wretchedly hit by this COVID-19, but they will likewise be the intestinal fortitude of recovery in communities.
Toward attaining this, the policy brief highlights three cross priorities:
1). Guarantee women’s equal representation in all COVID-19 response planning and decision-making: Testimony across sectors, as well as economic planning and emergency response, validates wholeheartedly that policies that do not confer women or embrace them in decision-making are basically less effective, and can completely do harm. Besides individual women, women’s groups that are frequently on the front line of response in communities should likewise be represented and buttressed.
2). Initiates transformative change for equality by addressing the care economy, paid and unpaid: In the formal economy care jobs, beginning with teachers to nurses, are poorly paid relative to other sectors. In the home, women perform the greater part of care work, unpaid and imperceptible. Both are fundamental to day-to-day life and the economy on the other hand they are premised on and establish gendered norms and inequalities.
3). Target women and girls in all efforts to address the socio-economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic virus. It will be significant to employ an international gender lens to the blueprint of fiscal inducement parcels and social support programs to achieve greater equality, opportunities, and social protection.
These three cross-cutting priorities focus on the United States Secretary-General’s current Plea to Action on Human Rights, which singled out procedures that, if followed, would have a significant impact on the rights of women and girls.
Economic Effect of the COVID-19
The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic virus across the global economy will be deep. Previously, as delineated in the policy brief, shared responsibility, Universal Solidarity on the socioeconomic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic virus, markets and supply chains have been disarrayed, businesses are obligated to close or scale back operations, and millions have or will be unable to find jobs and source of revenue. The International Labor Organization (ILO) has projected that full or partial lockdown procedure currently afterward nearly 2.7 billion workers, representing around 81% of the world’s workforce, while the IMF estimates an important contraction of universal output in 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic virus is staggering the world economy in the direction of a global decline, which will be strikingly different from previous recessions. Emerging proof on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic virus proposes that women’s economic and productive lives will be affected excessively and differently from men. Throughout the universe, most women earn less, save less; hold less secure jobs, who are more probably to be employed in the informal sector. They have less access to social protection and they are mostly the bulk of single-parent households. Their ability to absorb economic shocks is therefore less than that of men.
As women take larger responsibilities of care burdens at home, their jobs will likewise be excessively affected by cuts and lay-offs. Such effects risk continuing the previously fragile gains made in female labor force participation, restricting women’s ability to support themselves and their families, particularly for female-headed households. In several countries, the first round of layoffs has been mainly severe in the service sector, including retail, hospitality, and tourism, where women are over-represented.
The condition is worse in developing economics especially Liberia, where the vast majority of women’s employment-70 percent is in the informal economy with insufficient protections against dismissal or for paid sick leave and inadequate access to social protection. To earn a living, these workers frequently depend on public space and social interactions, which are at the moment been restricted to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic virus. Regarding the Ebola virus which exhibited that quarantines can meaningfully reduce women’s economic and livelihood activities, snowballing poverty rates, and worsening food insecurity. In Liberia where approximately 85 percent of daily market dealers are women the Ebola precautionary measures (which comprised travel restrictions) cruelly obstructed women’s livelihoods and economic security. Furthermore, though men’s economic activity resumed to pre-crisis level shortly after precautionary measures decreased, the influences on women’s economic security and livelihoods continued much longer.
Beginning with past knowledge and emerging statistics, it is likely to project that the influences of the COVID-19 pandemic virus global downturn will result in a continued dip in women’s incomes and labor force participation, with amalgamated effects for women already living in poverty. On behalf of those who, as a result of current economic growth managed to escape from extreme poverty, they are probably to fall back into this most defenseless of the situations once again.
Economic Retrieval Procedures
Everything we do throughout the COVID-19 pandemic crisis must target to build more equal, inclusive, and sustainable economics and societies in Liberia. This is feasibly the vibrant lesson evolving from the pandemic. This comprises gender-responsive economic and social policies and places women’s economic lives at the core of the pandemic response and recovery plans.
From the 31st of March, 65 nations had approved fiscal response parcels equal to a total of US$4.8 trillion. A total of 106 countries had familiarized or implemented social protection and job programs in response to COVID-19 beginning April 3. Within these parcels, social assistance (non-contributory transfers) is the most extensively used tool, followed by social insurance and supply-side labor market interventions. It is significant for these interventions to include sex-disaggregated statistics, a gender lens, and the exact targeting of women. For instance, cash-transfer programs are the most commonly used social assistance intervention. Sectors where women are a large percentage of workers, and where supply chains have been interrupted, ought to have sufficient access to credit, loans, and subsidy, so they can maintain the female workforce. Likewise, disbursement measures need to be taken into account women’s and girl’s care responsibilities and possible informal status in their employment to make welfares available to them.
Beyond this, the entire variety of economic policies for both instant response and long-term recovery need to be devised and executed with a gender lens. This contains elimination of obstacles that prevent the full participation of women in economic activities, equal wage and the same chances, social protection arrangements that feature in existing prejudices, financing for women entrepreneurs, and mechanisms to encourage women’s self-employment. Such economic responses would comprise both the public and private domains. Correspondingly, tightening gender-based education gaps and guaranteeing women remain in and increase their participation in the formal labor market drive an important role in providing various economics with the ability to ricochet with stronger, more reasonable, and sustainable growth.
Finally, existing social protection schemes are not extensive enough. Several women will not have contact as safety nets often depend on formal participation in the labor force. In South Asia, about 80 percent of women in non-agricultural jobs are in informal employment; in sub-Saharan Africa, this number is 74 percent; also Latin America and the Caribbean 54 percent of women in non-agricultural jobs partake in informal employment. Access to welfare such as health insurance paid sick and maternity leave, pensions, and unemployment welfares need to extend further than formal employment and be available to women in all domains of work.
Based on the aforementioned, it is suggested that national response strategy should:
v Place cash in women’s hands- if Liberia has an existing program in place that can directly place money in the hands of women, such as conditional cash transfer programs using mobile banking, those programs should be lengthened.
v Initiate measures that can also be executed with low operation costs (such as temporarily removing electricity bills for poor clients).
v Use pre-existing national social protection programs and adopt targeting policies to safeguard income for groups exaggerated by COVID-19 and particularly where women are profoundly represented (tourism, education, marketing, restaurants, hospitality, etc.)
v Spread out rudimentary social protection to informal employees.
v Introduce measures to lessen the tax weight on women-owned businesses.
v Use women’s networks and civil society organizations, comprising microfinance and savings groups, to communicate on welfares.
v Assimilate a gender survey in all counties in Liberia to comprehend the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic virus on women and girls, together with its economic effect, and how to address it successfully.
Unwavering support to informal employees and women-led businesses is particularly serious: financial support needs to aim at hard-hit women-led initiatives and businesses in feminized sectors with supported and state-financed loans, tax, and social security reimbursement deferrals and exemptions. The Liberian government could, for example, support income replacement measures to informal laborers, including methods that precisely cover domestic employees. Public procurement of food, rudimentary supplies, hygienic, and personal protective gear could be a straight source from women-led businesses. Women in the informal economy need to be supported to access cash transfers or unemployment benefits, particularly those who do not have access to financial transactions.
II. Health effect of COVID-19 on women and teenagers.
Introduction:
Health epidemics can make it more problematic for women and girls to obtain treatment and health services. This is amalgamated by numerous or interesting inequalities, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, race, geographic location, and sexual orientation, among others which influences access and decision-making to critical health services and information about the COVID-19 pandemic virus that is hovering around the world. Women and girls have peculiar health necessities, but they are less likely to have access to quality health services, vital medicines, and vaccines, maternal and reproductive health care, or insurance coverage for tedious and disastrous health costs, particularly in rural and marginalized communities in Liberia. Obstructive social norms and gender conception can also limit women’s capability to access health services. All of this has specific influences during an extensive health crisis.
Women might remain at danger due to the work-related sex-separation:
Universally, women make up 70 percent of the health labor force and are more probably to be front-line health personnel, particularly nurses, midwives, and community health personnel. They are likewise the majority of health facility service staff such as domestic workers, laundry; catering, and as such, they are more likely to be visible to the virus. In certain regions, women have fewer accesses to personal protective gear or appropriately sized apparatus. Notwithstanding these numbers, women are frequently not reflected in national or universal decision-making on the rejoinder to COVID-19 pandemic virus prevention.
Effects on sexual and reproductive health:
The delivery of sexual and reproductive health services, as well as maternal health care and gender-based violence associated services, are vital to the health, constitutional rights, and well-being of women and girls. The deviation of care and acute resources away from these necessities might result in aggravated maternal mortality and morbidity, escalated rates of adolescent pregnancies, HIV, and sexually transmitted diseases. In Latin America and the Caribbean, it is projected that an additional 18 million women will be unable to find regular access to modern contraceptives, given the present situation of the COVID-19 pandemic virus in the world.
By what means can national responses address the health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic virus?
It is acute for all public health vigilance and response plans to the COVID-19 pandemic virus focus on the forthcoming and unintended health influences of women and girls.
Guarantee that women and girls have access to COVID-19 public health communications: Health care rejoinder must support the development and propagation of communication on public health to the diverse settings and affairs of women and girls. With inadequate access to education and thus low levels of literacy in some locations, communication must be available, ethnically suitable, and understandable by all. Correct COVID-19 prevention and medical information must also be distributed in conflict-affected contexts to reach all women and girls as well as those in isolated and rural communities in Liberia.
Focus on the role of women as vanguard health personnel:
Exceptional care needs to be given to the health, psychosocial needs, and work environment of vanguard female health personnel, as well as midwives, nurses, community health personnel, including facility maintenance staff. Personal protective apparatus must be a suitable size for women. It is imperative to include products such as important hygiene and sanitation substances (e.g. sanitary pads, soap, hand sanitizers, etc.) for female health personnel, women and girls, mainly those quarantined for prevention, screening, and treatment. Given the intensified vulnerability of female vanguard workers and community volunteers, and cases of violence against them, strong actions need to be put into place to avert and alleviate abuse and gender-based violence. The opinions of women on the forefronts must be incorporated in response planning.
Create provisions for standard health services to be continued, especially for sexual and reproductive health care:
Specific attention needs to focus on health care facilities for older women, gender-based violence survivors, as well as antenatal, postnatal care, and conveyance services, together with emergency obstetric and newborn care.
III. Unpaid care job.
Introduction:
The COVID-19 worldwide catastrophe has made blatantly visible the fact that the world’s formal economics and the conservation of our daily lives are built on the imperceptible and voluntary labor of women and girls. With children out of school, exaggerated care needs of older persons and ill family members, and flabbergasted health facilities, ultimatum for care work in a COVID-19 world have deepened exponentially.
The unpaid care economy is a serious anchor of the COVID-19 rejoinder: There are gross inequities in the gender distribution of unpaid care work. Before the COVID-19 converted into a universal public health, women were doing three times as much unpaid care and indigenous job as men. This invisible economy has real effects on the formal economy, and women’s lives. In Latin America the price of unpaid job is projected to represent between 15.2 percent (Ecuador) and 25.3 percent (Costa Rica) of GDP. In the situation of the virus, the augmented ultimatum for care job is excavating previously prevailing disparities in the gender division of labor. The less perceptible parts of the care economy are pending beneath increasing tension nevertheless remain unexplained in the economic response.
Health care:
As clinic and healthcare centers brawl to curtail the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic virus, the health care liability on families and communities is habitually snowballing daily. Individuals affected by COVID-19 patients may be free quickly to make space for other on the other hand they will still need care and support at home. Non-COVID-19 associated health and social facilities may be climbed back, with the intention that families need to make available greater provision to members who suffer other infections, as well as long-lasting illness. Women are at the vanguard of the COVID-19 response as the nonattendance unpaid family caregivers and bulk of unpaid or poorly paid community health personnel.
School closures have place further tension and ultimatum on women and girls: In conformity to UNESCO, 1.52 billion students (87 percent) and around 60 million teachers are currently home as COVID-19 school closures increase. As formal and informal supply and childcare deteriorates, the request for unpaid childcare provision is dwindling more profoundly on women, not merely because of the prevailing structure of the labor force, but also because of social norms. This will limit their ability to work, particularly when jobs cannot be carried out remotely. The dearth of childcare support is mainly challenging for essential laborers who have care responsibilities. Confirmation from the United States illustrates that women does not only hold 78 percent of all hospital jobs, nevertheless, also 70 percent of pharmacy jobs and 51 percent of grocery store roles.
Cares for older persons are also a life-threatening need in the expression of the COVID-19 pandemic virus: Across nations, women are inordinately represented among older persons, specifically as they progress in age. Universally, women represent 57 percent of those aged 70 years and 62 percent of those aloft age 80. Older women tend to face lesser life revenues and also lower pensions, with less potential to access care for themselves. Women of all ages offer the bulk of unpaid maintenance for older folks, male or female; the endurance of this care rest on their own health and wellbeing as well their ability to curtail the risk of contamination for people in their care.
Girls and juvenile girls are also affected by the care job weights of COVID-19: Current statistics illustrates that teenage girls spend significantly extra hours on everyday jobs compared to their male counterparts. School closures do not just mean that teenagers are taking on more responsibilities at home; it might as well lead to more adolescents dropping out of school before they complete their education, particularly teenagers living in poverty, those with ill health or living in rural, isolated localities. Before the emergence this epidemic, millions of teenagers were competing with poor quality education and millions were not on course to meet the lowest skill in basic reading and math, nor the secondary level skills, knowledge and opportunities they necessity for a productive and fulfilling life. Proof from past pandemic demonstrates that teenage girls are at certain risk of drop out and not returning to school even if the disaster is over.
What measures are required to build a gender-inclusive economic response and reclamation?
Women’s voluntary care job has long been documented as a driver of disparity. It has a straight connection to salary variation, lower income, poorer education results, and physical and psychological health pressure. The unpaid and imperceptible work in this sector has been deteriorated exponentially by the COVID-19 pandemic virus. Nonetheless the pandemic has also made blatantly clear the way in which the day-to-day functioning of families, communities, and the formal economy are dependent on this invisible job. As we re-erect economic structures which are more comprehensive and resilient, there is an opportunity to be transformative, and to identify, decrease and reallocate unpaid care labor.
Despite the fact that women will step in to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic virus, the unpaid labor they provide is not substantially flexible. Deprived of adequate provision, the long-term costs of stretching women’s labor to cover up the holes in social protection and public services provision can be shocking. Thus, an immediate action is required to guarantee endurance of care for those who want and to identify unpaid family and community caregivers as important labor force in this adversity.
Direct steps are required to guarantee that the COVID-19 pandemic virus does not invert the gender equality improvement attained in recent eras, in particular with respect to women’s involvement in the labor force. Resolutions on savings currently will have palpable impacts later. For instance, the outcome of the 2008 global financial crisis, assistance measures were delivered to large infrastructure ventures that mainly employed men, although jobs were cut in teaching, nursing and public services, all female- concentrated segments.
COVID-19 assistance procedures rejoinder must go beyond employees who hold formal sector jobs and include informal and part-time laborers, most of whom are ladies. This is mostly necessary in female subjugated domains such as the hospitality, food and tourism sectors, which is halt due to quarantine measures by governments. Many countries are now moving in this direction. For instance, Italy is considering putting into place support measures to cover informal and temporary laborers when their contracts are expire. Finally, bailouts and assistance measures should not merely support large and average sized enterprises, but also micro and small businesses, where women entrepreneurs are comparatively represented. Furthermore, private sector financial support and access to credit should be correspondingly accessible to women and men.
Away from the direct catastrophe it is likely that there will be some remaining effect on social norms that could underwrite to greater equality. With numerous companies universally shifting to elastic work arrangements, it is clear that this model of working, which allows for greater harmonizing of work and care responsibilities, is conceivable. Similarly, as many women remained to work outside the home as important service workers, or for families where both parents are at home through this disguising period of work and child care, fathers assuming primary or shared caregiver roles may have collision effects on the division of labor and embedded gender role post-crisis. These changes need to be deliberately built on and solidified.
It is suggested that national measures should consist of:
Guarantee the steadiness of care for older persons, persons with incapacities and those who recover from the COVID-19 pandemic virus.
Equipped unpaid caregivers and community health personnel with information, training, adequate apparatus and livelihood assistance to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic virus proficiently.
Increase and provide comprehensive social protection for caregivers to alleviate the impacts of the burden of unpaid care labor by:
Increasing access to paid family leave and paid sick leave.
Increase the range and benefit levels of social support programs that excessively target women, such as cash transfers and social pensions, and suspend all conditionality for the period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prioritize investments in and access to basic available infrastructure and public facilities, as well as rural areas and informal settlements by:
Increasing childcare provision for employed parents where schools, childcare and respite care facilities are locked, with specific emphasis on safe and available facilities for essential employees.
Ensure access to adequate and reasonable water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities for susceptible groups of women, as well as informal settlements, rural communities and isolated regions.
IV. Gender-based Violence
Introduction:
The United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez call for global cessation of hostilities and an end to all forms of violence and to focus our attention and resources on mitigating the spread of the pandemic corona virus has not stop. Violence is not just on the frontline, it is also practice in households. Violence against women and girls is snowballing universally as the COVID-19 pandemic merge with economic and social anxieties and measures to restrict contact and movement. Congested households, substance abuse, limited access to facilities and reduced peer support are worsening these circumstances. Before the pandemic, it was projected that one in three women will experience violence throughout their lifetimes. Many of these women are currently trapped in their homes with their abusers.
Despite the fact that it is too early for comprehensive data, there are already lots of deeply concerning reports of augmented violence against women around the world, with surges being reported in myriad cases of upwards of 25% in countries with reporting systems in place. In some countries reported cases have doubled up. These numbers are furthermore expected to reflect only the worst cases. Deprived of access to private spaces, several women will tussle to make a call or to seek help online.
In conjunction with the increase in statistics, violence against women is taking on new intricacy: exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic virus is being used as a danger; abusers are maltreating the incapacity of women to call for help or escape; women risk being frightened on the street with nowhere to go. By the same time, support facilities are struggling. Court, police and health facilities that are supposed to be the first to respond to women are restrained, they have transferred priorities, or if not incapable to help. Civil society organizations are affected by lockdown or reallocation of resources.
It is significant for national response strategies to prioritize support for women by implementing methods that have demonstrated to be effective. They comprise of:
Amalgamate prevention efforts and facilities to respond to violence against women in the COVID-19 response strategies;
Designate domestic violence housings as essential facilities and cumulative resources to them, and to civil society organizations on the forefront of response.
It is significant for national responses to include comprehensive communications to the public that justice and the rule of law is not postponed during periods of quarantine or lockdown. Gender-based violence prevention policies need to be cohesive into operational tactics of the justice and security sectors for the crisis and decrees of limitations on offenses, mostly sexual violence offenses should be enforced.
A study conducted in New South Wales, Australia, discovered that 40 percent of vanguard workers have reported augmented appeal for help by survivors, and 70 percent have reported that the cases received have increased in their level of intricacy during the COVID-19 pandemic virus eruption. In Canada, the government’s COVID-19 answer packages contain $50 million CAD to provide housings assistance for women facing sexual and other forms of gender-based violence. In Australia $150million AUD of the national response was set aside for family violence response.
V. Effects of COVID-19 on Philanthropic and Fragile Settings and on Human Rights.
The COVID-19 pandemic virus presents devastating risks for women and teenagers in fragile and conflict affected environments. Disruptions to serious health, philanthropic and development programs can have life and death penalties where health systems may already be devastated or mostly non-existent. More than 50 percent of all maternal deaths occur from difficulties in pregnancy and childbirth in countries affected by instability, further effects on health sector are expected to drive this figure up even further. In settings across conflict landscapes, women whether emigrant, refugee, rural, poor or otherwise ostracized face isolation, the concerted spread of misinformation and a lack of access to critical technologies.
Limitations on the movements of police and security forces can generate a rule of law vacuum in isolated communities and increase the pervasiveness of sexual and gender-based violence on women human rights. The shift to online dialogue also risk tapering the space for women civil society groups to operate and to embark on urgent advocacy and service provision in support of women’s rights.
The effective execution of women, peace and security agenda needs to remain a priority throughout this historical time. The Security Council resolution 2242 (2015) remained one of the Council resolutions to identify health epidemics as part of the peace and security landscape, and highlight the need for the ethics of deterrence, protection and equal participation and leadership of women to be part of all responses.
Finally, the global pandemic has led to an important upsurge in restrictions on the freedom of movement of people universally and troublesome reports on the misuse of emergency procedures to further erode human rights and rule of law. This has led to an opposing effect on the civic space and the capability of communities and individuals to exercise their right to peaceful gathering and freedom of expression. Women leaders and advocates continue to bear the impact of harassment and attacks both on and offline. The anticipation of a long-term global decline raise serious concerns over how these protection gaps and human rights restrictions will be addressed. Post-pandemic recovery will optimistically lead to an expansion of rights and participation of women in public affairs so that we are more resilient to future disaster.
Conclusion
The pandemic has increase and deepen all existing inequalities. These disparities in turn shape those who are affected, the severity of that effect, and our efforts at reclamation. The COVID-19 pandemic and its social and economic effects have created a global crisis unrivaled in the history of the United Nations and one which necessitates the entire response of society to match its pure scale and intricacy. Nevertheless this response, whether at the national or international level, will be meaningfully weakened if it does not feature in the ways in which inequalities have made all of us more susceptible to the impacts of the crisis. Or, if we decide to simply replicate previous policies and fail to use this moment to reconstruct more equal, comprehensive and resilient societies. Instead, every COVID-19 response strategies, and every recovery parcel and make financial arrangements of resources, needs to address the gender effects of this pandemic virus. This means: (1) including women and women’s organizations at the core of the COVID-19 response; (2) altered the inequalities of unpaid care work into the current, comprehensive care economy that works for everybody; and (3) designed socio-economic strategies with international concentration on the lives and futures of women and teenagers. Positioning women and adolescents at the center of economics will essentially drive healthier and further sustainable development outcomes for all, support a more speedy recovery, and place us back on equilibrium to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
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