By Mustapha Kamara
UN Women has called for “more support to the efforts of women trying to end the deadly Ebola fever”.
Speaking at their annual ‘Open Day’ in Freetown, a representative United Nations body working towards the empowerment and establishment of women in governance said they were making the call because “about 50-70% of those contracting and dying of the Ebola virus disease are women and girls owing to their socio-economic roles and tasks to their respective families.”
Rosaline Marcathy said the rate of infection continued unabated, noting that as at the end of November Sierra Leone had recorded 5,906 cumulative confirmed cases and 1,522 cumulative deaths.
“Women and girls have been raped in quarantined homes. Pregnant women can’t access maternal and reproductive health care services due to the situation of the Ebola outbreak,” Macarthy said.
She also especially women and girls had borne the brunt of the outbreak and continued to do so, adding that the outbreak was also causing other socioeconomic problems for those affected women and even the unaffected ones.
To alleviate the situation, UN Women in Sierra Leone had recommended that the UN family should “intensify active assistance to collect gender analysis to enable a clearer response to the deferring needs of infected and affected women, men, boys and girls”.
The agency said the UN should also “intensify its effort in the facilitation of the establishment of community-based isolation and care homes and assist in transferring skills to community women on how to protect themselves and families from Ebola infection”.
The organisation also recommended that “the UN families operating in Sierra Leone should continue to support women led civil society organizations so that they would be able to mobilize initiatives to increase the involvement of more women and girls to undertake psychosocial services for Ebola affected persons”.
It urged the Sierra Leonean government “to involve more youths so as to continuously mobilize activities, as well as, disseminating Ebola related messages in all communities across the country”.
Responding to the recommendations, UN Resident Coordinator, David McLachlan-Karr, commended UN Women noting that the world body had provided logistics and finance to support the country towards ending the dreadful Ebola virus disease. He added that they had deployed more resources to eradicate Ebola virus from Sierra Leone.
McLachlan-Karr assured that the “UN will continue to do what needs to be done to ensure that the disease is wiped out of Sierra Leone and the subregion”.
© Politico 04
