Gender and flood evacuation: Structural barriers to women’s flood mobility in rural Punjab, Pakistan

Abstract

Displacement caused by floods is often considered as mobility problem. However, many women in rural Punjab become unable to move at all during the hazardous times. The core idea of this paper is to explore the causes of the immobility of women during floods. Mixed method research design is used to explore the causes of immobility of women in the four districts of Punjab; Muzaffargarh, Mianwali, Sargodha and Attock. The districts are cautiously selected by keeping in view their different demography, economic activity, social norms and living standard of women. 480 well-structured household surveys along with semi structured interviews and focus group discussions are conducted across the four districts. They help in building a Livelihood Vulnerability Index and Mobility Constraint Scale. The findings produce stark outcomes. They suggest that immobility is caused by many factors such as sociocultural norms, religious teachings, weak political and administrative system, low literacy rate, fragile economic and health condition, and devastated route and relief camps. These causes operate differently before, during and after a flood, but they interact cumulatively rather than in isolation, producing what this paper terms compound immobility. The paper closes with policy recommendations that are grounded in the study districts rather than borrowed wholesale from international templates, and situates Pakistan's experience against comparative evidence from Bangladesh.