The gendered experiences of local volunteers in conflicts and emergencies

Abstract

This article explores the gendered experiences of local volunteers operating in conflicts and emergencies. Despite decades of progress to integrate gender issues into development and humanitarian research, policy, and practice, the gendered dynamics of volunteering are still little understood. To redress this, this article draws on data collected as part of the Volunteers in Conflicts and Emergencies (ViCE) Initiative, a collaboration between the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement led by the Swedish Red Cross, and the Centre for International Development at Northumbria University. Contributing original empirical findings on the intersection of gender, volunteering, and emergencies, this article offers new ways of thinking about how gender equality and women's empowerment can be advanced in humanitarian crises, as seen through the experiences of local volunteers.

Perspectives of health and community stakeholders on community-delivered models of malaria elimination in Lao People’s Democratic Republic: A qualitative study

“…They also requested to have at least three volunteers, including at least a female volunteer, per village. Along with the gender line, female volunteers predominantly engage in caring roles like health promotion and household visits, while male volunteers tend to take on more front-line roles in emergency response [ 57 ]; and female patients are more likely to seek primary health care services from female volunteers for gender sensitive health problems [ 58 ]. Moreover, studies from other settings have indicated that community choose volunteers with good character, honesty, diligence, the spirit of volunteerism, and prefer to select local residents rather than outsiders because of familiarity, cultural similarities and trustworthiness [ 59 – 62 ].…”

Uneven geographies of youth volunteering in Uganda: Multi-scalar discourses and practices

“…With some exceptions (e.g. Jenkins, 2009;Prince and Brown, 2016;Barford et al, 2021;Baillie Smith et al, 2018;Baillie Smith et al, 2019), the unique local and national geographies of volunteering in the global South, and how volunteering relates to mobilities beyond a North-South lens, remain relatively under-researched. While this reflects North-South silos in geographical scholarship, interdisciplinary work on volunteering beyond geography has also tended to focus on separate global North contexts or international volunteering mobilities.…”

“…We situate the privileging of particular forms of youth volunteering in Uganda and their associated exclusion of vulnerable groups at the interface of 'global' volunteering policy and knowledges, aid and development architectures, youth unemployment, community institutions and local socio-economic inequalities. We place 'global' in parentheses here to highlight that claims to the universality of volunteering with their associated policy making and advocacy, in reality reflect the histories and experiences of volunteering in Europe and North America (Baillie Smith et al, 2019). The power that comes with this, linked to the mainstreaming of volunteers as development actors, is an important feature of the ways volunteering is mobilised within state and other strategies for youth engagement, skills enhancement and meeting development needs.…”

Volunteering Hierarchies in the Global South: Remuneration and Livelihoods

“…The framing of volunteers as a cheap army of labour for service delivery has then underpinned an emphasis on recruitment and motivation in both research and practice. This instrumental approach has sidelined analysis of wider articulations between volunteering and inequalities, such as between different groups of volunteers, where some groups-such as women-face particular challenges to volunteer (Cadesky et al 2019), or between forms of volunteering, where some forms are privileged over others. In this paper, we bring these foci together-volunteers as service deliverers, inequalities among volunteers, volunteering and social inequalities-by exploring the hierarchies that are produced and exacerbated by donor-funded remuneration of volunteers in the global South. Remuneration in volunteering is a growing feature of the policy and practice landscape of volunteering in the global South and has been subject to scholarly and policy makers' attention in recent years (Hunter and Ross 2013;Lough et al 2016; Prince and Brown 2016; Butcher and Einolf 2017).…”