Shining a Light on Gender Based Violence in Refugee Camps
In 2011, President Obama signed the as part of a greater global security action plan “to
empower half the world’s population as equal partners in preventing conflict and building
peace in countries threatened and affected by war, violence, and insecurity.” The NAP was
also written with the mission for USA agents to work collaboratively to strengthen NGOs’
abilities to work towards ending GBV.
As part of the NAP, IRC and CDC, with funding from OFTA, distributed handheld solar lights
to all households in two IDP camps in Porte-au-Prince, Haiti in August 2013. The goal of the
intervention was to evaluate the use and benefits of handheld solar lights and to explore
sense of safety among females aged 14 years and older living in the camps.
Lead investigator Michelle Dynes, an ERRB EIS Officer specializing in Reproductive Health,
noted that, “lots of organizations are giving out lights, but there’s really not a lot of
scientific evidence to support the ubiquitous distribution. It makes intuitive sense, but we
don’t have data to back it up. This was an attempt to build a foundational level of evidence
in support of or against the use of portable solar lights in refugee camps.”
The 8 month study began with baseline focus group discussions and 754 household
surveys. The team was able to follow more than 500 of the same women who participated
at baseline. Ms. Dynes attributed the success of follow-up to the strong IRC presence in the
two camps during the period of the study. “The (IRC) teams did monitoring visits on a
rolling basis. It was great because IRC folks in the camp almost every day,” she said. At the
end of the 8 months, the teams conducted an endline evaluation survey as well as focus
group discussions.
“It was extremely intensive, but the fact that we were in Haiti on the ground for those 8
months helped us gather important information like ‘how long were these lights lasting
overtime? Were they breaking? Were they being sold by residents? Were women using
them as often at the end compared to at the end?’ We were getting answers to a lot of
questions you wouldn’t be able to answer if you just did a cross sectional study. Monitoring
was an extremely important aspect of this study,” Ms. Dynes said.
However, the conclusions of the evaluation lead both teams to ask many more questions.
“One finding we had was that at the endline evaluation, women reported they were going
out more at night than they did at baseline,” Ms. Dynes noted, “We can’t attribute that
directly to having the light because the evaluation wasn’t designed that way, but
importantly there is a pattern to note that the distribution of these lights and the fact that
women are going out more might increase their risk. It may be that women feel safer, but
does that mean that they actually are safer? We don’t know.”
What can we learn from this?
“For the general public, it is important to understand that we often take something as basic
as lighting for granted because it is part of our everyday. We don’t even think about it going
into a room or when we’re walking down street, and when you have a vulnerable
population like women and girls in a camp setting, lighting becomes even more critical.
What we found with the study is that it really improves women’s and girls’ day to day lives
in really straightforward ways. With the solar light, children can study in the evening and
women can continue their economic work in the evenings like sewing or weaving.”
While the evaluation concluded that the lights improved women’s and girls’ lives in many
ways, the evaluation did not address their most commonly held fears (e.g. physical
violence, gunshots). Future studies need to be expanded to other settings and further
evaluate the role of lighting in the prevention of GBV in emergency settings.