Michael Kaiyatsa of the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, a CSO that promotes democracy and human rights in Malawi, outlines the pandemic’s impacts on women and LGBTQI+ people, among others, and his organisation’s work to respond:

The effects are greater for groups that are already marginalised such as women, people with disabilities, refugees and LGBTQI+ people. It is clear that this pandemic has deepened the human rights violations these groups were already facing. For instance, we have witnessed an increase in cases of homophobic and transphobic attacks, particularly in our refugee camp, as well as an increase in cases of sexual and gender-based violence in general.

In response, we are adapting our work to respond to these new challenges – both now and in the long-term – while ensuring that we continue to work towards our vision of a Malawi society that embraces human rights and democracy. For instance, noting livelihood challenges that women living with HIV/AIDS are facing, we have included a livelihood support component in our project targeting groups of women living with HIV/AIDS. We have also included security and livelihood support for our community of LGBQTI+ refugees that we are supporting at Dzaleka Refugee Camp.

Alyaa Al Ansari of Bent Al-Rafedain Organisation, an Iraqi feminist CSO that works to ensure the protection of women and children and promotes women’s integration in all spheres of society, highlights the impacts on women:

The pandemic has affected many different groups of Iraqi society, but women and girls have been the most affected of all. Since before the pandemic, Iraqi women were socially compelled to have the biggest share of care responsibilities within their families: they are the main caregivers for children and older people. When a full lockdown was imposed in Iraq for four months, these responsibilities grew even more.

Many women were financially affected as the pandemic swept away countless businesses, including hotels, restaurants and shops, because they lost their jobs in the private sector. Without a stable income, their families suffered, particularly when they were the family’s main breadwinner.

Another dramatic effect of the full lockdown was the spike in domestic violence. For four long months, abused women had no way out. They had to continue to live under the same roof as their abusers. There were more femicides and more attempted suicides were reported as some women could not bear the pressure and the violence they were subjected to.

During the pandemic, civil society efforts focused on providing humanitarian aid to affected women and their families. Charity organisations covered essential needs of poor families and helped women who lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

As for feminist CSOs, some set up online programmes to provide psychological support. Other organisations shifted their face-to-face activities online and took to social media platforms such as Facebook to reach women who had to stay at home for unusually long periods.

Amali Tower of Climate Refugees, which defends the rights of people displaced and forced to migrate due to climate change, draws parallels between the impacts of the pandemic emergency and those of the climate crisis:

Inequality, poverty and the vulnerabilities that underpin migration have grown exponentially during these two years to situations of distress migration. The inequality of vaccine distribution is an example of how the world responds to an issue that ‘affects us all’. This should inform us of how the world is responding to climate change, another issue the west and global north countries like to posit as an existential threat to us all.

As has always been the case, frontline communities in wars, crises, climate change get on with surviving, and these two years have shown us ample positive examples yet again that we’ve tried our best to amplify, support and facilitate with stories, connections, conversations and policy inputs that demonstrate how systemic socio-economic inequality, rooted in colonialism, is still very much a reality for much of the world.

An activist from Burundi, who asked to stay anonymous for security reasons, described the negative impacts of the pandemic on their organisation’s ways of working:

The pandemic has had negative effects on the way people used to interact as in many circumstances, physical contacts were reduced. Working with people using technology – such as Zoom meetings, phone calls or emails – does not help to get a real view of what happens on the ground. It has also hindered those who cannot afford the technological tools of communication from accessing needed information.

COVID-19 has also restricted people from traveling. Field work was almost stopped and international partners could not conduct their missions to evaluate the field work of their local partners.

Wendy Figueroa of the National Network of Shelters, a Mexican network that brings together 69 centres dedicated to the prevention, care and protection of victims of family and gender-based violence, highlights both the successes and challenges of the transition to more online ways of working:

The pandemic has marked a before and after in the way we not only work but also interact, build and create intervention and organisational strategies. In some ways it has strengthened our actions: for instance, the use of digital platforms has allowed us to keep in touch nationally and internationally, sharing knowledge, concerns and strategies.

But there has also been an overload of activities and our personal time has been blurred as we work from our home offices, with a very thin line separating countless virtual meetings and multiple searches for funding to continue our work and address the impacts of the pandemic.

Tsubasa Yuki of the Moyai Support Centre for Independent Living, a CSO that supports homeless people in Tokyo, Japan, offers an example of an online scheme launched in response to the pandemic, which had the effect of extending the organisation’s reach:

In 2021, we launched an online supporting system called ‘COMPASS’, which is composed of a chat system, a reference system that supports people finding public welfare services and an online service that helps people to complete an application sheet for public assistance. As the influence of pandemic is not limited to Tokyo but prevalent across the nation, we thought we need online services accessible from everywhere.

Elif Ege of Mor Çatı, which runs the only independent women’s shelter in Turkey, shares the lessons learned and the advocacy needs identified:

We have learned that it is vital that the mechanisms created to tackle violence against women should be prepared for any kind of emergencies ahead of time. During the pandemic the public support and preventive mechanisms – including law enforcement, violence prevention centres, social services, family courts and bar associations – and municipalities’ support services – solidarity centres, social services and shelters – were not prepared for this type of an experience at all.

Women were left without any support in their struggle against violence. Considering that in Turkey the discrepancy between the law and its implementation has been growing for decades now and bad practices are very common and go unpunished, this was not a completely new experience for us. However the pandemic deepened the intensity of this issue.

Therefore, it is very important for us, independent women’s and feminist organisations, to pressure the responsible institutions to implement the law, prevent bad practices and to create and implement emergency action plans.

Sebastián Pilo of Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), a CSO dedicated to defending the rights of the most disadvantaged groups and strengthening democracy in Argentina, highlights the need for ongoing reflection, learning and adjustment as the pandemic progressed:

Lockdowns taught us lessons about the ways in which those of us who work for ACIJ can connect with each other. The second year of the pandemic was particularly challenging because we had the lessons learned from the previous year and it was time to structure them in order to shape a new way of working, in a context of generalised fatigue with the situation we were experiencing; but at the same time, the end of the pandemic had not yet materialised, which implied a situation of constant progress and setbacks in the implementation of a new model.

We learned – and continue to learn – about virtual work and have been experiencing a transition from our fully face-to-face working model to a hybrid model, taking advantage of the opportunities of each.

While we continue to learn about the power and effectiveness of our advocacy actions in the tension between face-to-face and virtual work, our goal is to adopt a model that allows us to think collectively and creatively about the responses civil society can give to the growing and deepening inequalities suffered by the communities we work with, on the way to defining what kind of organisation we will be in the medium term, based on the shock that our work experienced due to the pandemic.

The pandemic conditioned the way we plan our actions. It confirmed the need to be flexible in the face of what the situation demands, both in terms of the issues that affect the disadvantaged communities we work with, and in terms of the advocacy strategies required to respond to these inequalities.

Owen Tudor of the International Trade Union Confederation is looking ahead to the next emergency and distilling the policy lessons that need to be acted on now to mitigate the experience of future crises:

As the way the world operates continues to degrade the environment, we know that there will be more pandemics, in an intertwined existential threat that also promotes global tensions that are leading increasingly to military solutions, closed borders and shrinking space for civil society and democracy. Measures to prevent the next pandemic being even worse than COVID-19 will include more resources for quality public health services, greater investment in the care economy and making health and safety at workplaces a fundamental human right.