Making the Protection of Women and Girls Part of Everything We Do: A Conversation with USAID’s Sarah Charles
When disaster strikes, threats of violence and abuse facing women and girls multiply. We spoke with Sarah Charles, Assistant Administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), about how she became passionate about this issue and what USAID is doing to help.
Disasters don’t affect everyone equally. In the wake of catastrophe, women and girls are often the primary targets of growing violence, exploitation, and abuse. This is because in the midst of the chaos, stress, and brutality unleashed by emergencies, systems designed to keep us safe — like family structures, support services, and law enforcement — typically fail women and girls first.
Since being appointed to lead USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) in 2021, Sarah Charles has been at the forefront of efforts to strengthen protections for vulnerable groups across the Agency’s emergency responses. Her work draws on two decades of experience ranging from refugee work in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa to coordinating the international response to Ebola in West Africa.
We spoke with Sarah to learn more about how she came to this important work and how what she’s seen during her career has shaped her goals for BHA.
During your time at USAID, you’ve shown yourself to be a passionate advocate for women and girls. What first brought you to this work?
I was introduced to this work early in my career while working with Afghan refugees returning home from Pakistan. I arrived in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, not long after the coalition forces’ military campaigns began — so a relatively unstable environment. My family wasn’t exactly thrilled I was working there as a young woman then, but in retrospect it was a pretty magical time. Many Afghans were excited about the future and aid workers could move pretty freely.
My work in western Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province involved interviewing newly returned Afghans about their return experience and monitoring protection conditions. My female Afghan colleagues and I were able to sit down with women and girl returnees in very intimate settings that were closed to our male counterparts, share tea, and talk about their daily life and the challenges they experienced returning to Afghanistan. From those conversations, it became clear that female-headed households had very different needs than the general population. Decisions about return were intimately linked to proximity to services. One thing that stood out was how focused so many people were on ensuring their daughters could access education.
The experiences I had in Afghanistan showed me how critical it is to engage the people we’re seeking to support from the very beginning and make sure women and girls are part of the conversations from the outset of any response.
What do you think we could do to improve the services we are offering women and children during emergencies?
There can be a knee-jerk reaction in the earliest days after a disaster to say that food, shelter, water, and sanitation come first and that protection interventions, like efforts to prevent gender-based violence (GBV) and exploitation, are nice to have once everything else is covered. At BHA, we’re trying to flip that script and make protection a part of everything we do at the very beginning of a response. Part of that is also making sure women’s voices–and women led organizations–are engaged in the early days of a response.
What protection crises are you following right now?
Wherever there is displacement and deprivation, there are protection concerns. Right now, I’m focused on Haiti, where reports of GBV are reminiscent of what we’ve seen in conflicts where rape has been used as a weapon of war. Recently, there’s been a tremendous amount of attention on the fuel shortages, gang activities, cholera outbreak, and food insecurity in the country and less coverage of the very serious protection concerns unfolding in an environment of extreme violence. We’re seeing early marriage, the sale of women and girls, and very high levels of sexual violence. We’re reorienting our assistance to center on protection, even while we work to address the other pieces of the crisis that are getting more attention.
People reading this are probably well aware of the protection concerns in Northern Ethiopia. Until just a few weeks ago, access into the Tigray Region had been highly constrained, and challenges still remain. As we rush in with assistance following the negotiated permanent ceasefire, a top priority is pressing for unhindered access that allows us to monitor, report, and support sustained protection services that are so critical in an environment where levels of sexual violence and GBV have been very high.
This work can be very emotionally taxing. What gives you hope?
It often feels like we live in a world where everything is on fire, especially when the news focuses on tragedies. It can make you feel hopeless. At BHA, we have a tremendous privilege, responsibility, and opportunity to be able to respond and support women and girls in very concrete ways.
I’m proud and excited by the leadership we’ve been able to provide to keep protection and GBV issues front of mind inside the humanitarian system. One of the first moves we were able to make after I arrived at BHA was to re-establish our partnership with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) to provide dedicated support for survivors of GBV and GBV prevention.
We also just launched Safe from the Start ReVisioned in partnership with the Department of State. This initiative is helping us expand protection services available to vulnerable women and girls at the very beginning of disasters and supporting them to lead decision-making processes on issues that impact their own safety.
In coordination with the launch of Safe from the Start ReVisioned, I traveled to Guatemala, a country where we’ve put GBV prevention at the center of our emergency response efforts, with a particular emphasis on women-led organizations. I met with a number of local, women-led organizations and saw first-hand how much more effective our assistance can be when these groups are the ones identifying community needs and driving solutions. I feel a very particular responsibility to grow our level of ambition in this space.
Get more information on the U.S. government’s work to combat gender-based violence in emergencies.
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