West and Central Africa Regional workshop on the Handbook for coordinating GBV interventions in emergencies

The REGA team for West and Central Africa in collaboration with the UNFPA Humanitarian Response Division (HRD) and the UNFPA regional office for West and Central Africa have jointly conducted from 12 to 14 April 2023 in Somone, Senegal, a workshop on the GBV in emergencies handbook coordination for GBV inter-agency coordinators, GBV information management specialists, GBVIMS specialists and UNFPA humanitarian coordinators. A total of 23 people attended the workshop, of which 15 participants came from countries in the region where cluster systems are.

During the three-day workshop, participants had the opportunity to go through all the contents of the GBViE Handbook Coordination, mainly the second part of the manual on how to implement each of the six key functions of a GBV sub-cluster and the expected results per key function in accordance with the IASC-19 Manual as well as the OCHA-2015 guidelines on cluster coordination.The Handbook for coordinating GBV interventions in emergencies can be downloaded her: https://gbvaor.net/#keydocument-block

In order to harmonize views and set the frame of the workshop, a refresher session on the understanding of GBV concepts, the different approaches to prevent, respond to and mitigate the risks of GBV in humanitarian situations, GBV in the humanitarian architecture and a summary of the 2021-2025 strategy of the GBV AoR at the global level were provided. This helped to clarify UNFPA's mandate in humanitarian situations, the roles of the GBV AoR and the collaboration between global, regional and country level actors in order to enhance UNFPA's role as the lead agency of the GBV area of responsibility. For each of the six key functions, the participants took up challenges in the field and shared practical experiences for mutual capacity building in order to improve GBV coordination in humanitarian countries in West and Central Africa. Another highlight of the workshop was the sharing of good practices between countries on how to strengthen the participation of members in information collection, discussions on the different tools used (formats and contents), collaboration with other clusters including the protection cluster and the child protection AoR and the PSEA task force, etc. In addition, the workshop enabled discussions on how to further improve collaboration between GBV Interagency coordinators and UNFPA humanitarian coordinators because there is no effective GBV coordination without strong GBV programs and vice versa.