OCHA Interagency Protection / Gender / PSEA Project 2024-2025

Humanitarian needs continue to grow and deepen as the number of people requiring humanitarian assistance sets new records. Protection risks continue to increase across the globe, compounded by armed conflicts. Women and girls suffer disproportionally from violent conflicts due to gender-based violence and challenges to gender equality.

Despite commitments and efforts from the humanitarian community to create a humanitarian environment, in which people caught up in crises can safely access protection services and assistance without fear of exploitation or abuse by any aid worker, sexual exploitation and abuse continues to be a dire reality in the humanitarian sector.

In this context of increasing protection needs and widening gender inequality, protection, gender and PSEA continue being underfunded and deprioritized. The Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls (2020) highlight that significant gaps in system-wide gender equality and protection capacities remain. Similarly, the independent review of the implementation of the IASC Protection Policy (2022) recognized the need for increased collective efforts to implement global commitments to achieve gender equality and protection outcomes. The roles of the inter-agency Protection Standby Capacity Project, the Gender Standby Capacity Project and the Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Project advisors, are to complement existing capacities in prioritizing gender equality, protection and PSEA in humanitarian action.

• HCs
• HCTs
• UN agencies, in particular WPF and UNHCR
• NGO consortia
• Cluster coordinators

1. Deployments: Ensure that protection, gender equality programming, women’s empowerment and gender mainstreaming are at the centre of humanitarian action, and improve prevention and response to PSEA in high-risk humanitarian operations through the advisory support to the humanitarian leadership and operations (HCs and HCTs)
2. Capacity Strengthening: Enhance the capacity of humanitarian decision makers in the area of protection, gender equality and PSEA
3. Policy influencing and sharing of practice and tools: Inform policy making at global and national level by knowledge sharing and best practice in the areas of protection, gender equality and PSEA

Expected results:  

1. Deployments: Provide senior-level strategic, inter-agency, system-strengthening directly to humanitarian leaders and operations (HCs and HCTs)
2. Capacity Strengthening: Undertake learning and capacity-building at the global, regional, country and local levels to enhance the centrality of protection, gender equality programming and PSEA
3. Policy influencing and sharing of practice and tools: Link policy and advocacy with practice through the provision of a practitioner’s perspective in global dialogues, drawing from field-level best practices and lessons learned

Results from previous phases:   As part of Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) reforms in 2020, GenCap and ProCap strengthened their focus on field impact, the sustainability of results and the prioritization of support to align with system-wide response priorities. These reforms, the pandemic’s impact, and the projects’ roll-out in the humanitarian community created an uptick in demand. ProCap’s presence was closely associated with progress on strategies and collective efforts to promote and operationalize the centrality of protection in the response. GenCap contributed to the development of comprehensive Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) gender strategies to garner collective action and had an important catalytic effect on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls through humanitarian responses.

• OCHA Core Contribution
• Peer-2-Peer (P2P) Support Project
• Contribution to WFP Protection & Accountability to Affected People (AAP) policy implementation