In communities across Haiti, women emerged as the primary organizers of COVID-19 community responses, drawing on existing networks, traditional leadership roles, and the deep community connections that Haitian women had built through years of organizing around health, education, and economic survival. Without waiting for government direction that was slow to come, women’s organizations mounted their own campaigns for hygiene education, mask distribution, and community mutual aid.
Women’s health organizations that had been working on reproductive health, maternal mortality, and gender-based violence adapted their networks and expertise to COVID communication, developing culturally appropriate messaging in Haitian Creole that reached communities more effectively than centrally produced government communications. Their existing relationships with community members and their credibility as trusted sources of health information gave their COVID messaging a reach and impact that official channels could not match.
In markets and informal economic spaces where women dominated, female vendors took the lead in implementing whatever precautions were feasible — insisting on mask-wearing among their customers, creating hand-washing stations, and managing customer flow to reduce crowding. Their practical authority over the commercial spaces they controlled made them key enforcement agents for health measures in the informal economy.
Women’s organizations also led the mutual aid responses that sustained vulnerable households during the most acute phases of the crisis, organizing food sharing, childcare support, and economic assistance for families whose incomes had collapsed. As in so many previous crises, Haitian women were holding communities together when formal institutions could not.