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"Working with Gender Action...has been enriching, inspiring and even exhilarating. Gender Action is one of the few gender-focused organizations still around today whose works and words reverberate in the 'high places' (World Bank, IMF, etc.) telling them about injustices they perpetrate directly or otherwise, in the remotest regions of the world, and get these wrongs righted several times. What other cause can be more impactful than bringing relief to several thousands of people - men, women, children, in far away regions? Gender Action has worked over the years to ensure environmental, human and health rights for some of the most oppressed and discriminated people from Asia to the most remote communities in Africa, ensuing gender equity, speaking up for silenced women. Their gender-specific work has been monumental."
- Betty Abah, Friends of the Earth Nigeria
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Gender Action Events
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Broken Promises: Publication and Launch Event
As polished Ministers of Finance and Central Bank Governors convened in Washington, D.C. for the World Bank and IMF's Annual Meetings in September 2011, Gender Action launched Broken Promises, exposing the less glamorous side of International Financial Institution (IFI) investments. Based on fieldwork done in partnership with Friends of the Earth member groups in Nigeria, Cameroon, Togo and Ghana, Broken Promises examines the gender impacts of the IFI-funded Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and West African Gas Pipeline. Surveys and compelling testimonials reveal the detrimental consequences of the pipelines on women in Africa, such as deepened poverty, destroyed livelihoods, gender discrimination, increased prostitution, weakened decision-making power, health deterioration and environmental degradation. In the several communities visited, local women stated that Gender Action and Friends of the Earth's joint project represented the first time that they could share their perspectives on these IFI investments, despite the profoundly negative impact the pipelines have had on their daily lives.
Gender Action presented the report's findings at a well-attended event featuring speakers Betty Abah (Friends of the Earth, Nigeria), Korinna Horta (Urgewald), Eimi Watanabe (World Bank Inspection Panel) and Sonia Lowman (Gender Action), and moderator Liane Schalatek (Heinrich Boell Foundation). Watch coverage of the event on YouTube.
WDR Roundtable
Outside the IMF/ World Bank Annual Meetings, Gender Action also hosted a roundtable on the World Development Report (WDR). The event convened U.S.-based and international activists to strategize a civil society response to the 2012 Gender Equality and Development WDR. Though impressive in the scope and breadth of its research, the Gender WDR is unlikely to impact World Bank investments, which continue to inadequately address gender inequalities and fail to promote women's human rights.
Elaine at WIDER
WIDER-UN University featured Gender Action President Elaine Zuckerman at a fall multilateral development aid conference. Elaine reviewed the gender impacts of World Bank food security, sexual and reproductive health rights and HIV, post-conflict and pipelines investments. She recommended that the Bank replace its weak gender policy with a strong mandatory policy and enforce it; expand and deepen its gender expertise; stop privatizing social services, which denies poor people access to health and water; and stop financing dirty oil and gas pipelines that benefit oil companies but harm poor women, men, boys and girls.
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Capacity-Building and Partnerships
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 In June 2011, Gender Action staff conducted IFI gender research, analysis and advocacy capacity-building workshops with civil society partners in Cameroon and Kenya. The three day workshops enabled participants from Jamaa Resource Initiatives (JRI; Kenya) and the Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation (LUKMEF; Cameroon) to navigate World Bank and African Development Bank websites, access project documentation, and conduct gender analyses using Gender Action's Gender Toolkit for International Finance Watchers. Both partners are using the skills they learned in Gender Action's workshop to collect "on the ground" data in their countries.
"Our project is proving far more important, informative, empowering than we originally thought it was going to be a simple data collection and analysis. It is now revealing a lot of information and community participative tools to us than we thought. No such in-country and intensive site visits and research has been done outside the government's own commissioned evaluations. I definitely think that whoever would want to help Africa should invest his money to keep governments and these funders open and transparent." - LUKMEF Executive Director, Christian Tanyi
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Research for Advocacy
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Governing Climate Funds: What Will Work for Women?
As the international community mobilizes to address climate change, civil society must help ensure that taxpayer-funded multilateral climate funds benefit the people who need them most. Gender Action's joint publication with Oxfam and the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) highlights women and girls' disproportionate vulnerability to negative climate change impacts in developing countries, and demonstrates how they have been largely excluded from climate finance policies and programs. By presenting the experiences of two existing climate funds and two non-climate funds, the report suggests good practices integrating gender into climate finance mechanisms in order to ensure women have equal access to adaptive and mitigative activities and in light of their critical role in addressing global climate changes.
Links & Case-Studies
Gender Action continually publishes resources on topics critical to gender rights and IFIs. Recently, we initiated a series on Gender, IFIs and Gender-Based Violence (GBV), which includes a Link, a Primer, and a Democratic Republic of Congo Case-Study to be launched on November 25 - the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Our research demonstrates that IFI policies and investments rarely address or monitor GBV and ignore GBV affecting men and boys.
During the last half year, Gender Action has also expanded its series on Gender, IFIs and Food Insecurity. Building on our food insecurity Primer and Ethiopia case-study, we recently released a Haiti case-study, showing that World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) agriculture and rural development investments contribute to increasing food insecurity in Haiti, especially among poor rural Haitian women who face significant gender discrimination in the agricultural sector.
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Lagarde Letter
Following IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn's May 2011 resignation over allegations of rape, Gender Action led a campaign to ensure that his replacement prioritizes gender rights in IMF investments. We launched a women's letter to Christine Lagarde, the IMF's new Managing Director, to draw her attention to the harmful impacts of IMF loans on the world's two billion people living in poverty, the most vulnerable of whom are women and girls. The letter, signed by 40 other civil society organizations, called on Lagarde to lead IMF reforms that end low-income country debt and austere IMF conditionalities.
Op-Ed in the Guardian
Gender Action published its first op-ed in the Guardian's "Poverty Matters" blog, calling for the World Bank to promote gender equality and women's empowerment in all agriculture and rural development investments. While the Bank's annual budget has more than doubled in the past five years to US$58.8 billion, the share of its budget devoted to the agriculture sector has decreased by 2 to 3 percent. Bank investments in financial and private sector development, meanwhile, more than quadrupled from US$4.2 billion to US$17.7 billion in the same period. Further, although the Bank acknowledges that gender equality is critical to achieving the Millennium Development Goal to end extreme hunger, most World Bank agriculture investments inadequately address relevant gender inequalities, such as discriminatory barriers to land ownership, credit, agricultural inputs like seeds and fertilizers, women's lower education levels, women's lack of decision-making and leadership roles, and unequal domestic and childcare responsibilities. You can view the full op-ed here.
On the Radio
On November 1, Chicago's Public Radio station WBEZ featured Gender Action President, Elaine Zuckerman. She stopped by the station to discuss IFIs' negative impacts on gender equality, especially those caused by IFI oil and gas pipeline investments. Elaine emphasized how IFIs must end harmful loan conditionalities and debt, and improve their governance diversity. She singled out how the IMF must increase women's presence in senior staff and management positions, which men now dominate. You can listen to Elaine's full interview here.
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