In neighborhoods across Port-au-Prince and in rural communities throughout Haiti, women leaders operating at the grassroots level were doing the essential work of maintaining community life in 2020 — organizing mutual aid, mediating conflicts, running community services, and advocating for their neighborhoods with whatever authorities remained functional. These women rarely appeared in news coverage or official reports, but their work was indispensable to the social fabric of a country whose formal institutions had largely failed.
Community organizations led by women operated food distribution networks that kept hungry families fed during crisis periods. Women’s savings groups provided emergency funds for members facing unexpected expenses. Female community leaders organized communal childcare that allowed mothers to work. Religious women’s organizations ran de facto social services for the elderly, sick, and otherwise vulnerable.
The women who led these efforts operated under enormous personal stress and often at genuine physical risk. Several community women leaders in areas of gang conflict had been threatened or attacked for their organizing work, which gangs perceived as a threat to their control. Others faced domestic pressures that punished their community involvement at the expense of family obligations.
Women’s rights organizations documented the critical role of women in community resilience and called for greater recognition and support of their leadership. They argued that the international development community’s focus on formal institutions and national-level politics systematically undervalued the community leadership that was actually keeping Haitian society functional, and that addressing this undervaluation required both changed funding priorities and a different conceptual framework for understanding what development looked like in practice.