Browse by Theme: Covid19

When the coronavirus pandemic hit Mali, most families CARE works with that had been eating three meals a day suddenly had to drop to eating only once a day. The combination of markets closing, quarantine measures, and falling incomes meant that people had to conserve food carefully. Six months later, most of those families are eating three meals a day again. Why? Because local communities mobilised to share information, and worked with CARE to distribute cash transfers to the families most in need.

Violence against women and girls or gender-based violence (GBV), whether it takes place in the home, in the workplace, in public spaces, schools or communities is one of the most widespread human rights abuses around the world. On average, 1 in 3 women globally experiences physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, usually from an intimate partner. In addition to devastating impacts on the dignity, security and wellbeing of survivors, violence against women also has broad social and economic costs across societies, including costs on public services, lost income and productivity.

We asked CARE’s teams responding to COVID-19: what would you change if you could do it all over again? The answers showed that, as ever, CARE staff show remarkable learning, adaptability, and ambition to change the world – even in the face of a global pandemic.

On 4th August 2020, one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history devastated large parts of the Lebanese capital. At least 200 people lost their lives, over 300,000 were left homeless and the blast caused an estimated US$15 billion in damage. Three months on, CARE’s Emergency Shelter Advisor – one of the first CARE staff to deploy during the global pandemic – shares five lessons on responding to a complex crisis in the time of COVID-19.

On 17 March 2020, the Jordanian government introduced measures to tackle the spread of COVID-19 in Jordan. Under such measures, Jordanians were only able to leave their homes between 8.00am and 6.00pm. Every day at 6.00pm, a curfew siren would be sounded, after which point no one was permitted to leave their property. The punishments for breaking such measures were severe as the Jordanian government imposed one of the strictest nationwide lockdowns in the world, with lawbreakers facing arrest and up to a year in prison.

Growing up in Uganda I saw directly the effects of climate change. Temperatures have risen and extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods and droughts have increased in intensity and frequency.

“The course of life changed overnight,” says Carrine Annette Bidzogo, from Cameroon. Carinne is one of more than 6,000 women who share their voices in CARE’s new report She Told Us So: Filling the Data Gap to Build Back Equal. The first ever report of its kind, it highlights how women themselves say they are experiencing the coronavirus pandemic, and what that tells us about what we need to do next.