How women in India are helping those most vulnerable during the coronavirus pandemic

June 15, 2020

This is a guest blog from Sarika Sinha, Director of Policy Campaigns and Communications, ActionAid India

The coronavirus pandemic has brought so much disruption to so many. All over the world, people are having to shift their priorities, to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, to step up and be brave.

Bhopal, the city in India where I live and work, is no exception.

As ActionAid India’s Director of Policy, Campaigns and Communications operating from Bhopal, I have seen our staff and volunteers become extremely resourceful as we expand our services and try to protect the most vulnerable in our society from this terrible disease.

One of our key initiatives here is a centre, established in 2014 as a joint venture with the government, that offers support to women who have survived violence. From emotional support to legal assistance and economic rehabilitation, we have helped more than 30,000 women recover from trauma and begin new chapters in their lives.

How the coronavirus pandemic has changed the centre and our lives

The name of our women’s centre is Gauravi, which means ‘brave heart.’ In recent months, during the coronavirus outbreak, this name has taken on a whole new meaning.

As I write this, there are a dozen women, each one trained by us to drive an electric rickshaw, who are out delivering vital supplies and emergency aid to vulnerable people in our city. They are using these vehicles – originally intended as an eco-friendly source of livelihood – to bring vital food, hygiene supplies and other essentials to those who are vulnerable and especially at risk, including sex workers, transgender communities, Muslim minorities and homeless people.

Talat, a survivor of domestic abuse, was supported by the Gauravi Centre and is now part of ActionAid India’s Covid-19 response. She has been using her rickshaw to deliver food to vulnerable people in Bhopal, India. Photo: ActionAid.

These fearless women are taking our ‘brave heart’ ethos to a whole new level

As the coronavirus pandemic has entered our community, the Gauravi Centre has become a vital hub for providing support to people and families affected by the virus and the lockdown. At the same time, we are also carrying on our important work for local women whose lives have been shattered by violence and abuse.

Nobody is getting paid for this work. They’re not doing it for money; like so many people all around the world, they’re helping because they care, because they want to do something. It’s very inspiring to see.

To aid us in our virus response, we’ve teamed up with about 18 different groups and organisations in the area, including community kitchens and shelters. With all of these amazing people working together, around the clock, we’ve been able to distribute up to 7,000 food packets and dry rations every day to the most excluded people.

Volunteers at the Gauravi Centre packing the food to be delivered. On some days they are distributing over 7,000 ration kits to families in need. Photo: ActionAid.

Of course there have been shortages. Like other places, we worry about running out of PPE, which is so vital for keeping our volunteers safe. There was one period when Bhopal’s entire health department was affected because they are frontline defenders. We had around 90 people getting infected in one go.

At that time the authorities made the lockdown very strict – for about a week, my family had very little food in the house, and had to eat less each day to make our supplies go further.

Running the Gauravi Centre under the stay-at-home order

I also fell ill at the start of April with a very high temperature and blood pressure, a cough, and the loss of my sense of taste and smell. I had to be quarantined at home for several weeks, and so I would spend many hours every day on the phone helping to co-ordinate our work.

I am feeling better now and have tested negative for Covid-19. My life still feels very topsy-turvy and I work from early in the morning to late at night.

I am not the only one who does so! Our amazing team of volunteers and ActionAid staff members are doing this, and no one complains. I’m so grateful to everyone who has supported ActionAid, enabling us not only to work with women and girls in Bhopal but to mount this immense operation that is saving lives around the city.

I derive a lot of strength from what’s happening thanks in part to the generosity of ActionAid supporters. These stories of people getting rations, of our volunteers being out there and getting stuff done — they give me hope.

I’m so grateful to everyone who has supported ActionAid, enabling us not only to work with women and girls in Bhopal but to mount this immense operation that is saving lives around the city.

Blog originally published by ActionAid in the UK.

Protestors at COP 28 in Dubai. Photo: Konrad Skotnicki.

Belfast Climate Change March, 2019. Photo: Trócaire.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

Despite their overwhelming contribution to global emissions, fossil fuel companies continue to attract significant financial backing—driven by their enduring profitability. This is starkly illustrated by the case of ExxonMobil, the top fossil fuel investment held by asset managers based in Ireland. In 2023, ExxonMobil reported €33.63 billion ($36 billion) in profit. That is almost twice the GDP of Botswana (€18.1 billion) and nearly three times Namibia’s GDP (€11.5 billion).

Ireland plays a hugely disproportionate role in facilitating investments into fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. In 2023, the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland generated an estimated 72.5 million tons of CO2e. This is more than the CO2e emissions for the entire country of Ireland—and more than ten times that generated by Sierra Leone.

The Global Human Impact

The climate crisis is here, now, and it is causing disproportionate harm in the Global South. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels and increasingly severe cyclones are displacing coastal communities, with projections indicating that 17% of the entire country could be underwater by 2050. The legally binding Paris Agreement on climate change explicitly acknowledges the importance of tackling private finance. Its three overarching goals are: keeping below 1.5C of warming; increasing adaptation and making finance flows consistent with low emissions and resilience.

This gives a clear mandate for action: both tax reform and corporate regulation are needed to tackle financial flows, and both nationally in Ireland and at EU level, ‘polluter pays’ taxes are lacking and regulation of the financial sector remains weak and fragmented. While EU regulation exists, it is designed more to nudge investors toward more sustainable investment practices by increasing transparency and reporting levels than to enforce strict standards. And it is moving in the wrong direction: the recently passed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive excluded investments; and now the EU Commission’s Omnibus legislative proposal threatens to undo the limited gains made on climate plans, as well as blocking future attempts for stronger action at national level.

The Risk of Inaction

Fossil fuel investment is too profitable to remain weakly regulated. If Ireland continues with its current strategy of encouraging FDI at all costs, and relying on weak EU regulation, we are headed for catastrophe. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5°C brings irreversible consequences: collapsed ice sheets, vanishing coral reefs, and extreme weather events that will make vast regions of the planet uninhabitable. And yet, companies are developing oil and gas fields that could push global warming beyond 2°C.

Our research found that 91% of the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland were to companies that have plans for fossil fuel expansion like these. Ireland cannot afford inaction on this issue.

About This Research

The figures in this report regarding investment from Ireland are based on new research commissioned by ActionAid Ireland and Trócaire. In the paper, we uncover the scale of fossil fuel investment through Ireland, who the investors are, and in which fossil fuel companies they are investing. We analyse the current regulatory framework and explain why it is inadequate—and moving in the wrong direction. And we make specific recommendations for change, which are summarised below.

Summary of Recommendations

Regulate the private financial sector
Ireland must end its outsized role as an enabler of destructive fossil fuel investment. Ireland should introduce a strong gender-responsive national human rights and environmental due diligence framework which includes the regulation of investors with respect to human rights and the environment and climate. The transposition of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could achieve this if downstream activities are included and the Omnibus proposal is rejected. Ireland should prohibit investments in fossil fuel expansion and require investors to implement climate transition plans consistent with a 1.5°C climate limit.

Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Ireland should endorse developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to curb fossil fuel expansion and commit to a fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels.

Support tax justice
Ireland should support bold and fair new global tax rules through the UN Framework Convention on Tax, should adopt all OECD BEPS measures, and should conduct an updated and comprehensive spillover analysis of its tax policy. Ireland should take coordinated action globally, at the EU level and domestically to introduce a range of new taxes to mobilise finance needed for climate justice, based on ‘polluter pays’ and social equity principles such as wealth taxes for the highest earners, climate damages tax on investors, fossil fuel production taxes and levies on aviation and shipping.

Finance a just transition
Ireland must also meet its fair share climate finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and pay our ecological debt to the Global South. Ireland should support conditionality-free debt cancellation for countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, commit to a new UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, moving debt negotiations from the IMF to the UN, and to a debt workout mechanism that is fully representative and fair.