ABSTRACT
Despite receiving less attention than high-income countries, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) experienced more than 85% of global excess deaths during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the unprecedented speed and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed large demands on government capacity, many LMICs relied on civil society organizations (CSOs) to assist in implementing COVID-19 response programs. Yet few studies have examined the critical role CSOs played in mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in low resource settings. This study explored the CSO response to COVID-19 in five of the most heavily impacted LMICs in the Global South. Interviews were conducted from May to August 2021 with a purposive sample of CSO key informants within each of the five countries. A total of 52 CSOs were selected from which 53 key informants were interviewed either via Zoom or by phone. Interviews were coded and analyzed using NVivo or MAXQDA2020. Out of the 52 CSOs selected, 24 were national organizations, 8 were regional, and 20 were local. CSOs fell into six categories: community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, unions/professional organizations, campaigns/social movements, research organizations/think tanks, and networks/coalitions. CSOs across all five countries adapted their missions, stretched their resources, and performed a wide range of activities that fit into five programmatic areas: food security and livelihood support, public health and medical care, cash transfer programs, risk communication and community education, and needs assessment. This qualitative analysis demonstrates the critical role CSOs played in supplementing government emergency aid response by delivering necessary resources and supporting highly vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the primary challenges they faced in doing so. Given the generally weak state of public capacity in the LMICs studied, this role was vital to responding to the pandemic.
ABSTRACT
It is often assumed that improvements in household wealth are associated with greater gender equality, including greater women's autonomy and decision-making power inside the home. Yet, evidence often shows the opposite: greater household wealth often curtails women's autonomy. Research has yet to reveal the driving forces behind this surprising finding. This paper focuses on one important social force, the community gender system, to show how it shapes the relationship between changing household wealth and women's autonomy. Drawing on a nationally representative panel of rural women in India and fixed effects models, I find that the prevalence of women's veiling at the village level, a notable marker of an exclusionary gender system, moderates the effects of increasing household wealth on women's autonomy. In villages with less veiling, increases in wealth have the perverse effect of suppressing women's autonomy. The study suggests that in these places, households curtail women's mobility because such behavior signals rising social status. In contrast, in villages with more veiling increasing household wealth does not reduce women's autonomy because most households across the class spectrum are already conforming to the norms of seclusion. The findings demonstrate how new wealth interacts with a community gender system which is anchored in gendered notions of family honor to reproduce structures of gender inequality.
