World Humanitarian Day: MAMA Centre Celebrates Humanitarian Women, Calls for Safe Operation Spaces

World Humanitarian Day: MAMA Centre Celebrates Humanitarian Women, Calls for Safe Operation Spaces

As the world commemorates the World Humanitarian Day 2019, the Mothers and Marginalised Advocacy (MAMA) Centre honours humanitarian efforts and support by Women Humanitarians, who passionately propagate the idea of supporting people in crisis worldwide.

While we acknowledge the unique role of women in peace and conflict resolution, we commend and celebrate the dogged contributions of Women Humanitarians in making the world a better place, despite the associated risks identified with Humanitarian world.

We continue to appreciate Women Humanitarians as the first responders to the “darkest hours of crisis”, revealing their incomparable exceptionality, while validating the global affirmation of female strength, power and perseverance at all levels.

We are not unaware of the existing life-threatening challenges and unjustified attacks targeted at Women Humanitarians at various humanitarian stages and processes.

We condemn in totality, discrimination and violence against female aid workers in any form or place across the world, while calling for more robust and supportive policy environment through implementation of appropriate surveillance system and competent reporting mechanism to encourage and address the plights of Women Humanitarians.

We encourage every humanitarian effort to take as cognisance, the essential role of women and girls as first responders, agents of change, as well as the best representatives of needs in humanitarian situations.

We also call for specific effort to reach marginalized women and girls, including women with disabilities, indigenous women, elderly women, and women of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity, to building on their needs and capacities in order to effectively engage them as active partners in humanitarian process.

We further advocate for safe operation spaces for women and adolescent girls in every humanitarian response to enable them brainstorm and devise appropriate response strategies at all levels.

Signed:
Barr. (Mrs.) Ola E. Onyegbula
Executive Director, MAMA Centre