Global Gender Analysis: COVID-19 Secondary Impacts on Health and Protection-related Issues

This thematic report is part of the ACAPS Gender & COVID-19 series providing global analysis on the gendered impact of the pandemic in key areas of humanitarian programming such as livelihood, income and employment or health and protection.

This report provides an overview of publicly available information on the identified and projected impacts of the pandemic on gender-based violence (GBV), healthcare provision and access, and other health-related risks. The report focuses on countries experiencing humanitarian crises which have undertaken gender analyses at the national and subnational levels.

Since the start of the pandemic, concerns have been raised about the possible consequences of government containment measures and how overwhelmed healthcare facilities may have resulted in, and continue to pose, different kinds of challenges to women, men, girls, and boys, along with gender conforming and non-conforming LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) individuals with or without disabilities.

The pandemic and its secondary impacts may also have unpredictable effects and programming should remain adaptable and informed by local contexts; acknowledging lessons learned from the past few months and from previous epidemics, alongside the pre-COVID context, could help in forecasting what these impacts may look like for different demographics. Constant gender- and disability-sensitive monitoring is required to adapt programming to different needs; this, coupled with a crisis-level analytical approach, could assess vulnerability factors to better understand the pandemic’s gendered impact and inform adapted and relevant responses that do not neglect vulnerable populations and that address the indirect consequences of the pandemic on people’s wellbeing.