Gender and Disaster Network

The Gender and Disaster Network (GDN www.gdnonline.org) was launched in July 1997. At its start, there was little consideration of gender in disasters and it spent much of its life seeking to influence policy, from the global to local levels, and advocating for a range of excluded and marginalised groups but with a major focus on women.

For the last 20 years, GDN has been an important source of information, knowledge, connections and influence over its lifetime (http://www.gdnonline.org/who_are_we.php). It maintains a registered membership of just over 1000 members worldwide, drawn from many discipline and practice areas and policy spaces. As such, it is a solid grounding for the development of the networking aims of the GRRIPP project, led by the IRDR Centre for Gender and Disaster (CGD).

While GDN has shared many research resources over its almost a quarter century existence, it has rarely carried out research of its own. This gap was the one that the Centre for Gender and Disaster (CGD) aims to fill and the GRRIPP Project is a significant vehicle for doing so. GRRIPP is connecting with the GDN Regional and Country Hubs and making links between regional members of GDN and regional teams of GRRIPP. We hope that over the course of the GRRIPP Project we will see a closer relationship developing as the two networks are highly complementary.