Women and Girls Safe Spaces: A Toolkit for Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in Humanitarian Settings

Women and Girls Safe Spaces (WGSS) are a structured place where women’s and adolescent girls’ physical and emotional safety is respected and where they are supported through processes of empowerment. WGSS have been a foundation for GBV programs in humanitarian settings for decades and are one of 16 Interagency Minimum Standards for GBV Programming in Emergencies.

WOMEN AND GIRLS SAFE SPACES: A TOOLKIT FOR WOMEN’S AND GIRLS’ EMPOWERMENT IN HUMANITARIAN SETTINGS aims to authentically support women’s and girls’ sense of self and empowerment by providing a global blueprint for WGSS programming based on quality standards of practice outlining the feminist informed principles, approaches and strategies necessary to cultivate empowering safe spaces. Read the one pager in English here.

The WGSS Toolkit seeks to ensure that frontline staff and supervisors have access to the knowledge, competencies and skills necessary to implement WGSS in humanitarian settings. The toolkit can be used for WGSS in humanitarian settings responding to natural disasters or conflicts, from the onset of an emergency throughout the relief and recovery phases, as well as, in development settings with large populations of internally displaced or refugee women and girls. The tools and guidance are applicable to WGSS implemented in camps, informal tented settlements, rural and urban environments, or border areas. Moreover, they equally support the range of programing approaches which include static or mobile delivery approaches, standalone or integrated programing approaches, and direct or in-partnership implementation approaches.

1. WGSS Core Concepts: Defines the fundamental concept of empowerment and outlines five objectives and guiding principles specific to WGSS for design, implementation and monitoring.
2. Assessment: Offers 7 tools and 2 databases which support the collection and analysis of assessment data to inform program design.
3. Start up: Offers 8 tools including a logical framework for women’s and girls’ safety and empowerment.
4. Staffing: Offers 6 tools and guidance on minimum staffing considerations.
5. Capacity-building: Offers 10 tools and 1 database focused on supporting the capacity of staff, volunteers, partners and WGSS members.
6. Implementation: Offers 9 tools and 6 databases and guidance on the Key Strategies for WGSS Implementation.
7. Empowering Exits: Offers 2 tools and guidance.