The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in partnership with the U.S. Department of State launched Safe from the Start ReVisioned, an initiative that focuses on improving and expanding protection services for women and girls from the start of every conflict or disaster. Because crises like natural disasters or conflicts exacerbate conditions of inequality, they disproportionately impact women and girls.
Support systems that are supposed to keep them safe – like families, communities, and governments – can fall apart in an emergency, drastically increasing the risks of gender-based violence (GBV) and making it hard to find desperately needed medical care or the services of social workers and counselors.
Safe from the Start ReVisioned demonstrates the United States’ commitment to advance a gender-transformative approach to the humanitarian response that promotes women’s leadership, prioritizes support and advocacy for GBV prevention and survivor-centered response programming, and shifts funding, influence, and decision-making power to women and girls within humanitarian response systems.
The overarching goal of this initiative is to better prevent and respond to the many forms of GBV that become magnified in emergencies, such as intimate partner violence, child marriage, and sexual violence. To do so, it calls on the global community to not only improve but change, the conventional humanitarian response by putting women and girls at the center of these efforts, as leaders and key stakeholders.
The original Safe from the Start initiative, which was launched in 2013, helped draw global attention to GBV programming as an essential, life-saving intervention from the onset of every humanitarian response. In early 2021, USAID and the State Department reflected on the significant progress made by Safe from the Start and developed a more ambitious framework. The result – Safe from the Start ReVisioned – is a new, even bolder step forward.
Safe from the Start ReVisioned focuses on improving and expanding humanitarian protection services for women and girls, such as GBV case management, psychosocial support, safe spaces, and peer support networks. Since women and girls often lead the recovery of their communities as front-line responders, experts, and service providers, it also emphasizes the need to shift power to crisis-affected women and recognize them as experts in their own safety and as leaders in their communities. Through this program, USAID and the State Department recommit to leading the global community in responding to the needs of women and girls, in all their diversity, from the very start of every conflict or disaster.