NGO strategies for sex and gender-based violence protection and accountability in long-term displacement settings: Reviewing women’s participation in humanitarian programmes in Dadaab refugee complex

This article addresses the intersection between non-governmental organisation (NGO) protection strategies for sex and gender-based violence in long-term displacement settings and recent discourse on humanitarian accountability practice. It comprises a desk-based review of two protection programmes operated by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Care International in the Dadaab refugee complex, Kenya, which provide new terrain for testing existing theories of humanitarian accountability and critically examining the relationships between NGOs’ accountability practices and their impact on the refugee communities they seek to engage. The article analyses how these two protection programmes conceptualise participation from the refugee community in relation to sector-wide approaches to accountability to affected populations (AAP), and considers how gender mainstreaming informs the specific expectations and experiences of women as active participants in decision-making and the provision of services. It considers how participatory approaches to humanitarian programming are often adopted by NGOs to accommodate a diverging set of interests and objectives, aiming to optimise operational performance as well as promoting a gender-inclusive, rights-based approach to sex and gender-based violence prevention. It asks whether the strategies adopted by the IRC and Care International, respectively, are effective in combatting the discriminatory gender norms that cause refugee women to be more at risk of sex and gender-based violence, finding that participation-based strategies that view women’s participation primarily as a tool for enhancing operational performance risk perpetuating the structural inequalities that exist within the affected community and compounding the marginalisation faced by refugee women. The article concludes that a more comprehensive system of gender mainstreaming must be adopted by NGOs across the humanitarian sector, to ensure that participatory approaches to protection from sex and gender based violence in long-term displacement settings prioritise gender equality as a substantive objective.