Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action (WPS-HA) programme

The Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action (WPS-HA) programme works to mainstream and strengthen the role of gender across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus and to support the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in Ethiopia. This includes advancing the focus on women and girls across humanitarian and peacebuilding efforts, programmes and initiatives in Ethiopia and ensuring that these are undertaken in a gender-sensitive ways.

Through the work of the WPS-HA programme, UN Women has positioned itself as a valuable humanitarian partner in Ethiopia. Thus far, the programme has contributed to capacity building of gender machineries and mainstreaming of gender across a variety of contexts, including: strengthening gender-mainstreaming capacity of humanitarian clusters and other stakeholders; establishing community-based complaints mechanisms for sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and training of  humanitarian responders on preventing SEA; collaborating with implementing partners to strengthen gender-based violence (GBV) mitigation and response efforts, and ensuring survivor-centered support, capacity-building, coordination, and awareness raising. The programme pays special focus on the localization of humanitarian action, and the access of women’s rights and women-led organizations to humanitarian decision making. The WPS-HA programme also represents the UN Women Ethiopia Country Office (ECO) in its role as co-chair of the national-level inter-agency coordination network for prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA). The network plays a leading role in mitigating and responding to SEA, in which ECO supports the implementation of the national-level PSEA Network strategy and workplan.

Through collaboration with different stakeholders, UN Women works to increase the participation of women in all peace and security related processes; ensure the protection of women in conflicts; strengthen women’s role in preventing conflicts; and address women’s needs in post-conflict relief and recovery activities. The WPS-HA programme provides technical and advisory support for the Ministry of Women and Social Affairs in leading the process of developing Ethiopia’s first National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace and Security. Additionally, UN Women has established partnership with the Ministry of Peace to ensure gender mainstreaming of all peace processes, frameworks and policy including but not limited to national dialogue ,  National Action Plan on Women Peace and Security and the transitional justice policy processes. Lastly, a key area of the WPS-HA programme is strengthening of the capacity of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to engage in peacebuilding and conflict resolution. In addition to trainings, awareness raising activities and funding, this means supporting CSOs networks and coalitions, such as the CSO Forum on Women, Peace and Security established since 2022.