CEDAW/C/GC/37
63. Social and legal inequalities further restrict the ability of women to mo ve to
safer, less disaster-prone areas and may limit women’s rights to access to financial
services, credit, social security benefits and secure tenure of land and other productive
resources. 24
64.
States parties should:
(a) Invest in gender-responsive social protection systems and social
services that reduce economic inequalities between women and men and enable
women to mitigate disaster risk and adapt to the adverse effects of climate
change. Eligibility criteria for social protection schemes should be closely
monitored to ensure that they are accessible to all groups of women, including
women heads of household, unmarried women, internally displaced, migrant and
refugee women and women with disabilities;
(b) Ensure the resilience to disasters of workplaces and critical
infrastructure, including nuclear reactors and plants, through regular
inspections and the adoption of building safety codes and other systems to
guarantee that such infrastructure, in particular that which is necessary for
income-generating and domestic activities, is rendered operational as
expeditiously as possible following disasters;
(c) Guarantee women’s equal right to decent and sustainable employment
opportunities, as provided for in article 11 of the Convention, and apply that
right in the context of disaster prevention, management and recovery and in
connection with climate change adaptation in both urban and rural areas;
(d) Facilitate equal access for women to markets, financial services, credit
and insurance schemes and regulate the informal economy to ensure that women
are able to claim pensions and other employment-related social security
entitlements;
(e) Acknowledge and address the unequal burden of the unpaid and care
work performed by women, including within disaster and climate policies.
Policies and programmes should be developed to assess, reduce and redistribute
the gendered burden of care tasks, such as awareness-raising programmes on the
equal sharing of domestic work and unpaid care work, the introduction of time saving measures and the inclusion of appropriate technology, services and
infrastructure;
(f) Protect and promote women’s right to access to training in nontraditional areas of work, including within the green economy, and sustainable
livelihoods, which would enable them to design, participate in, manage and
monitor disaster and climate change prevention, preparedness, mitigation and
adaptation initiatives and better equip them to benefit from such interventions.
D.
Right to health
65. Under article 12 of the Convention, States parties are to guarantee substantive
equality between women and men in the provision of health-care services, including
sexual and reproductive health services and mental and psychological health services.
The measures that States parties must take, under article 12, in order to respect,
protect and fulfil the right to health for all women are detailed in the Committee ’s
general recommendation No. 24 (1999) on women and health. Health services and
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24
18-03824
See general recommendation No. 29 (2013) on the economic consequences of marriage, family
relations and their dissolution and general recommendation No. 34 (2016) on the rights of rural
women.
19/24
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