“By coordinating our actions, we can achieve more systemic and sustainable changes,” emphasized Olesia Bondar, director of the Ukrainian Women’s Fund.
The Memorandum defines the key areas of cooperation, including promoting women’s leading participation in solving local problems during and after the war, providing resources and expert support for the development and implementation of action plans to address key issues faced by women and girls based on the results of the gender analysis, promoting the use of the developed solutions in other regions of Ukraine, and advocacy at the national level. The document sets out the intention to join the effort to create an effective network of stakeholders in the Kyiv community to empower women and girls and address the challenges they face in war-affected communities.
“Because of the war, Ukrainian women need even more psychological support and assistance. In addition to domestic violence, women have started to report sexual violence during the war. This is a very sensitive topic, because many women are afraid to talk about it, they withdraw into themselves,” said Maryna Honda, Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration for Self-Governance.
The Kyiv City State Administration has committed itself to taking measures to:
- provide support for the development of the Kyiv Coalition 1325;
- involve experts in training on gender analysis and train a team of psychologists to conduct regular psychological sessions to prevent professional burnout of specialists working with women and girls who have suffered from gender-based violence and conflict-related sexual violence;
- provide expert support to create a gender profile of the community, which will identify the key problems of women and girls in Kyiv during the war and in the post-war recovery process;
- develop a gender action plan to address the problems of women and girls in the community.
This activity will strengthen the projects “Women, Peace, Security: Responding to the Challenges of War,” “She Rises: Empowering Ukrainian Women in Wartime and Beyond,” and “Resilient Together: Improving the System of Response to War-Related Sexual Violence” implemented by the Ukrainian Women’s Fund.