Only 29 of the 65 UNFPA-established facilities in Ukraine catering to survivors of gender-based violence are operational, while the U.N. agency has lost contact with 16 of them, and it’s unclear what happened to them.
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The facilities offer shelter for gender-based violence survivors, and serve as crisis rooms or day care centers, and they are located across 30 cities in the country catering to 60% of the population. But one-third of those cities are now occupied by Russian forces, and it’s unclear to the United Nations Population Fund whether the facilities in those cities are still functioning.
“We don't know to what extent women have access to these services [in these areas]. And this is what really worries us the most,” Jaime Nadal, UNFPA representative for Ukraine, said during a media briefing Thursday.
UNFPA doesn’t have any information on the 16 facilities it has lost contact with, which Nadal said are in cities where there’s neither power nor functioning telephone lines or mobile coverage. Some of those cities have been under shelling amid the war, he said.
“There is a risk that some of them could have been damaged. We just don't know,” he added.
Meanwhile, seven of the remaining facilities have been repurposed, offering shelter to women fleeing the war, and 13 are not in service.
Several civil society and community-based organizations UNFPA used to work with in response to gender-based violence have also become nonoperational. But UNFPA is supporting some of them as they restructure and rebuild their capacities.
They include the Ukrainian Foundation for Public Health, which Nadal said “had a very important outreach capacity in eastern Ukraine,” but which has been severely affected by the war. Another is the Women’s League of Donetsk, an NGO based in Mariupol, which Nadal described as a “very strong community-based organization” but that has been “almost completely dismantled.”
“They have also restructured themselves, and they are now establishing networks in western Ukraine to provide support to women who are on the run or on the move,” he said.