The WMC responded within days to the tsunami, visiting the affected areas with relief and other assistance in the week following the disaster, and continued through the months of January and February 2005. The WMC provided for the immediate needs of women, with a range of goods such as under clothes, sanitary needs, maternity and child care products and kitchen utensils.

The WMC identified the need for gender sensitive and rights based approaches to the overall tsunami response. The gender specific impact of the tsunami included: the repercussions of displacement on women; the gender division of labour within the family and in society that exacerbated women's burden of care giving; the social ostracisation of widows; women's lack of access to land and property, credit and other productive resources; women's unfamiliarity of the functioning of government bureaucracies; women's increased vulnerability to sexual harassment; trafficking and domestic violence.

WMC is a member organization of the Coalition for Assisting Tsunami Affected Women (CATAW)