COVID-19 threatens to upend decades of progress toward gender equality. The pandemic undeniably harms the health, safety, and livelihood of millions of people globally. Yet experience from past disease outbreaks has taught us that the resulting school closures, lockdowns, and restricted access to health care will exaggerate existing gender disparity. Women and girls will be disproportionately affected, particularly those disadvantaged by poverty, age, race, geography, migration, disability, or health status. They face increased violence, reduced access to reproductive healthcare and rights, and a heightened caregiving burden. The crisis makes the work of reaching women and girls more critical than ever. However, when an emergency such as COVID-19 strikes, engaging women and girls is more difficult. Restricted mobility, lack of physical safety, loss of livelihood, and limited access to essential resources such as food and health care make remote programming necessary. WomenStrong International developed this guidance for adapting programming in response to the current emergency. Although remote programming is not new, particularly among humanitarian agencies, it often has been implemented on an ad hoc basis, with limited guidance. This publication seeks to fill that gap. It includes a menu of considerations, resources, and examples from the Americas, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
