Key points:
- Efforts to situate gender-based violence (GBV) within the COVID-19 pandemic remain inadequate. Based on the knowledge that the public health crises of violence and infectious disease are intersecting, we use a syndemic perspective to examine their shared influence in humanitarian settings.
- When the humanitarian community exclusively prioritises the lives saved from infectious diseases, such as Ebola and COVID-19, the lives impacted by interrelated factors, such as GBV, can be overlooked.
- This narrative leverages learnings from the 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to inform and strengthen ongoing responses related to GBV and COVID-19 within humanitarian settings.
- For both Ebola and COVID-19, response efforts have overlooked the life-saving nature of GBV services. These services, including one-stop crisis centres and safe spaces, are vulnerable to cessation when health service providers attempt to prevent and control the spread of infectious disease without incorporating a gender-sensitive lens.
- A critical opportunity to integrate women within response planning is through local women’s organisations which are already embedded in local communities.