GENDERED IMPACTS OF ECONOMIC POLICY REFORMS

IFI policy-based loans impose harmful economic reforms forcing poor countries to slash public spending. Women bear the brunt.

Gender Guide to World Bank and IMF Policy-Based Lending
Suzanna Dennis and Elaine Zuckerman, December 2006
Our Gender Guide highlights the gendered impacts of World Bank and IMF policy-based loans which often deepen poverty, undermine gender equality, contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS and bring about increased violence against women.

Gender Action is a founding, active member of the first concerted anti-IMF campaign that citizens’ groups launched during the September 2006 annual World Bank-IMF meetings. Read the campaign document, The IMF: Shrink it or Sink it.

Learn about the Jubilee Act!
The Jubilee Act: Cancels impoverished country debt, prohibits harmful economic and policy conditions on debt cancellation, mandates transparency and responsibility in lending from governments and international financial institutions, calls for a new legal framework to restrict the activities of predatory "vulture funds", and calls for a U.S. audit of debts resulting from odious and illegitimate lending.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN PEACE AND CONFLICT

Gender Action’s dedicated Women's Rights advocacy program ensures that IFIs promote women's property and political rights, address gender-based violence, the feminization of HIV/AIDS, and respond to newly emerging forms of exploitation including the growing global challenge of trafficking in women and children.

Gender Action’s analysis finds that the Asian Development Bank’s draft updated safeguard policies fail to protect women’s rights and gender equality

New Publication!
Mapping Multilateral Development Banks’ Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS Spending
Suzanna Dennis and Elaine Zuckerman, September 2007
This first report to determine the quantity and quality of all MDB spending for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS demonstrates a decline in World Bank funding for these sectors in recent years and very little spending by the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank on these themes. It charts mostly unmet IFI commitments to reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, and juxtaposes how harmful IFI loan conditionalities such as restricting public spending undermine governments’ ability to address these public health imperatives.

New Publication!
The Gender Dimensions of Post-Conflict Reconstruction: The World Bank Track Record
Elaine Zuckerman and Suzanna Dennis with Marcia E. Greenberg, June 2007
This new report evaluates World Bank investments in Post-Conflict Reconstruction (PCR) situations including a sample of large Bank PCR development loans and small Post-Conflict Fund grants. Our findings demonstrate the limited extent to which the world’s largest public development institution meets its own promised objective to integrate gender into all its investments.

This report is the latest in a Gender Action series underlining the continuing disconnect between World Bank rhetoric on the need for gender equality to reduce poverty, and scarce gender considerations in large Bank investments. To read the previous reports, please visit our publications page.

WOMEN, THE ENVIRONMENT AND INFRASTRUCTURE

The IFIs are reemphasizing infrastructure investments that were their mainstay in their early years. IFI projects need to address the infrastructure-environment-women nexus since women and girls are the primary natural resource managers in most countries, and are highly vulnerable to trafficking, prostitution and HIV that often accompanies male construction crews that build IFI-financed mega-projects.

Read Gender Action Consultant Suzanna Dennis's blog on climate change here!

GENDER ACTION IN THE PRESS

Elaine Zuckerman criticizes Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank’s lack of democracy and transparency, and its draft Health, Nutrition and Population Policy--which was subsequently rejected--on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio’s April 19th edition of Worldview. Download the audio file of this program.