The other face of the disaster: women, earthquakes and the new map of displacement in Venezuela

By the Humanitarian Analysis and Research Unit. July 2026.

When the ground moved violently across northern Venezuela on 24 June 2026, shaking the infrastructure of Caracas, La Guaira, Carabobo, Miranda and Aragua with two powerful earthquakes, global headlines went straight to the visible toll: collapsed buildings, destroyed roads, the urgent work of rescue. Beneath the surface of the natural disaster runs a quieter and more complicated crisis: the uneven weight of the catastrophe on women, and the reshaping of the region’s migration flows.

The disaster did not happen in a vacuum. It struck a society where pre-existing social vulnerability already fell disproportionately on women and girls. Data and field reports from international response agencies now indicate that the country’s recovery will depend on how the questions of gender and human mobility left behind by the earthquake are addressed.

1. The gender emergency: health, care and violence

Before the earthquakes, more than 60 percent of the people needing assistance in Venezuela were estimated to be women and girls. Since the disaster, that gap has widened substantially. The immediate effects on women and girls concentrate on three fronts: the collapse of health services, heightened risk of gender-based violence, and the overload of care work.

• Reproductive health on hold: the total or partial destruction of dozens of health centers halted prenatal consultations and emergency obstetric care. In a context where the adolescent pregnancy rate was already high, thousands of young women are now displaced and without access to basic hygiene supplies or medical monitoring.
• Gender-Based Violence (GBV): the loss of housing forced thousands of families into improvised shelters or into sleeping outdoors. The absence of safe, separated spaces in the camps has raised alarms at UN Women and among local organizations over the growing risk of harassment, sexual violence and trafficking networks.
• The care trap: as usually happens in disasters, the unpaid work of caring for children, older people and the injured has fallen overwhelmingly on women. Although they are the first responders in their own communities, organizing kitchens and supplies, the physical load and the informality of that work make it hard for them to rejoin the economic recovery.

2. The impact on the migrant community and on human mobility

The earthquake directly altered decisions about human mobility, both inside Venezuela’s borders and beyond them:

A. Mass internal displacement. The loss of housing infrastructure displaced thousands of people from the hardest-hit urban areas. Many women heading households were forced to move toward host communities or rural areas, straining service capacity further in the receiving regions.

B. A renewed need to migrate. For many women who had recently returned to the country, or who were managing to support their families through informal commerce, the earthquake destroyed what few livelihoods they had. This points toward a new outbound migration wave, driven not only by the socioeconomic situation that preceded it but by the total loss of housing and assets after the tragedy.

C. The diaspora as a lifeline. Abroad, the Venezuelan migrant community reacted immediately. Remittances sent by family members overseas have gone from being supplementary support to being the only real means of rebuilding women-led households in the country.

A call to action with a gender lens

The response to the earthquake cannot stop at clearing rubble and handing out standard food parcels. International agencies agree that the reconstruction of Venezuela has to carry a gender lens throughout:

1. Guarantee protection in shelters: installing lighting, physical partitions, and protocols to prevent and respond to gender-based violence.
2. Prioritize sexual and reproductive health: deploying mobile clinics to attend to pregnant women and to guarantee essential medical supplies.
3. Fund women’s organizations: bring community leaders to the tables where decisions are made and emergency funds are allocated.
4. Flexible international protection: receiving countries in the region should adopt complementary protection or regularization measures for those who cannot return to territory affected by the disaster.

The earthquake brought down structures of concrete. It also laid bare the resilience of Venezuelan women. Placing them at the center of humanitarian aid and reconstruction planning is not only a matter of fairness. It is the only real route to repairing the social fabric that was struck.