With nearly 3,000 km of coastline, Vietnam is at high risk to natural disasters. Extreme hazard events are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, sea level rise and environmental pollution problems that challenge sustainable development.

When a disaster occurs, both women and men play an important role in ensuring safety for themselves and family members, and the disaster management activities in their community. However, the impact of natural disasters on women and men are not the same and vary based on the factors including their type of work and family and social roles.

Inequality in the division of labour at the household level, as well as in the work that women are usually in charge of when natural disasters occur often places a double burden on women. Equally important, women have fewer and more limited opportunities than men to participate in public community activities in preparing, responding and recovering from disasters. This means they are less likely to have the opportunity to express their ideas, explain their unique needs or lead or participate in processes that shape how disasters are managed in their communities or workplaces. Improving opportunities and access to resources for women and girls can help make sure that disaster management activities are more effective and accountable.

The Government of Vietnam has issued many policies and measures to strengthen disaster prevention and climate change adaptation systems, and the 2015 Law on Disaster Prevention and Control notes the importance of gender-sensitive disaster risk reduction (DRR) and management (DRM). The Government has also been active in taking up its international commitments on gender mainstreaming in disaster prevention activities in order to gradually eliminate the gender inequality between women and men.

In recent years, there have been a number of teaching materials and advocacy documents on the importance of gender sensitive disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), but little documentation of practical lessons learned. To help the staff and lecturers apply reference materials on gender issues in a practical way, in this document the Vietnam Women's Union has brought together some specific lessons learned.  

The Lessons Learned have been compiled based on research into locally and internationally funded projects to benefit women and men in the disaster prone provinces in Vietnam. Ideas have drawn on the perspectives of the staff working in disaster prevention and control and on the views of international experts working in Viet Nam. The document does not aim to fully document or analyse any particular project, but focuses instead on good practice in identify and acting to ensure gender issues are taking into account in all stages of implementation.  
 
The 10 lessons focus on topics including raising awareness about gender and gender equality for officials and citizens, involving women in the decision-making process, on how to make community disaster prevention and control plans gender-sensitive, how to use micro-credit as a tool for gender-sensitive DRR-CCA projects and to empower groups such as elderly women to get involved in community based disaster risk management. It also stresses the continued importance of collecting sex-age and vulnerability disaggregated data.
   
Through the stories and lessons learned in this document, it is hoped that staff working in the field of disaster prevention will gain inspiration and new perspectives on how to integrate a gender into disaster and climate change adaptation action. It aims to encourage gender sensitivity in the process of collecting and analysing information, in risk assessment and the planning and implementation disaster risk management measures the community level. It is hoped that this can contribute to making gender analysis not only theoretical exercised but part of the core professional work of the policy makers, staff and managers in the field of disaster prevention. To support this learning, a short glossary on basic concepts of gender in the management of disaster risks is provided at the end of the document.

This work was undertaken as part of the joint MARD-UNDP project "Strengthening the institutional capacity for disaster risk, particularly the risks related to climate change" (SCDMII) which was implemented in partnership with Women’s Union, Viet Nam Red Cross and Oxfam with funding provided by the Australian Government and UN One Plan Fund.