Thank you for investing in Gender Action. Your gift will impact many lives and help us fulfill our mission to ensure women's rights and gender equality are promoted in international investments.

The many ways you can help further Gender Action's mission:

Support Gender Action

Make a tax-deductible donation through Network for Good

If you have any difficulty with these donations, please contact elainez@genderaction.org.

If you are interested in sending a check, please make it out to Gender Action and mail it to the following address:

Gender Action
925 H St NW
SUITE 410
Washington DC 20001-4978, USA

Contributions made by US residents to Gender Action, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, are tax-deductible.

Holidays 2024

Dear Gender Action Supporters and Would-be Supporters,

As ethno-nationalist, climate crisis-denying administrations are multiplying today, Gender Action is pressuring influential multilateral development banks operating in low-income countries to improve women's lives and prevent ecological damage.

Emblematically we are ending 2024 with a new case study[1] exposing how the Mandalika Tourism Project, financed by the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is undermining women lives and harming our planet's climate and biodiversity. Mandalika aims to be Indonesia's next Bali. You might be surprised to hear that a tourism project is harming women and the environment.

Here is how: Our Indonesian partners on the ground found Mandalika's buildout is deepening gender inequalities and violating human rights, for example by employing thugs to enforce involuntary land dispossession and police who barge into homes, terrifying women and children. Mandalika, a tourism project, does not justify "eminent domain" taking of private property for the public good.

Forced resettlement has also undermined Mandalikan women's income-generating activities comprised of husbandry, fishing, agriculture, and selling goods along the beach. Women's low level of education is preventing them from obtaining promised tourism industry jobs. Mandalika does not provide women with needed skills training. Instead, women who previously earned income are now forced into debt to buy daily necessities including rice, other food and motorcycles to transport children to now remote schools. Men, meanwhile, compete for short-term, low-paying daily construction jobs.

The project also fails to address women's expanded childcare responsibilities resulting from losing community care networks because of involuntary resettlement.

Mandalika's ecological devastation, which is destroying the natural environment, including fisheries, mangroves, hills, land, vegetation, paddy fields and trees, has disproportionately undermined biodiversity that supported women's daily sustenance livelihoods and culture. For example, they can no longer construct weaving looms from now destroyed plants. Their food sources have disappeared as land is repurposed for tourism. Gender Action is pushing the AIIB to stop environmental destruction and provide training and jobs to women in order to restore their livelihoods and end their spiraling debt.

Needless to say, women's debt in Mandalika is not unique. Women throughout the Global South, whose livelihoods largely depend on natural resources, are disproportionately impacted by today's global debt crisis that leads to austerity measures such as cutting spending on essential public services. Gender Action is spotlighting development bank borrower countries' unsustainable debt. In 2024 almost 100 countries spent more on debt service than on investments. Sixty of these countries are highly vulnerable to harmful climate change impacts. However, they are trapped in a vicious cycle in which they postpone investments in climate resilience to service debt, making them more vulnerable to climate impacts and further delaying development initiatives. To flip this paradigm, Gender Action is pressuring development banks to expand their paltry grant-based climate finance. Doing so could both reduce debt and enhance our planet's sustainability.

This year, Gender Action also continued pressuring the World Bank Group's private sector arm - its highly profitable International Finance Corporation (IFC) - to provide compensation to girls violated in the IFC-financed Bridge International Academies Project in Nairobi, Kenya. IFC staff failed to monitor the project even after learning that teachers were violating young girls. Gender Action and partner watchdog groups are pushing IFC management and shareholders to provide the abused girls with financial compensation, counseling, health care, community reintegration, and legal support. To end IFC's media nightmare resulting from our publicity, the IFC prematurely divested from the project without providing remedy to the violated girls. We are demanding the IFC and all development banks prevent sexual and gender-based violence and if it tragically occurs, they compensate the survivors.

Our Indonesian and Kenyan cases exemplify how Gender Action is advocating for gender and climate justice in taxpayer-funded development bank projects. We call for investments that increase gender equality, improve livelihoods, curtail spiraling debt and resulting austerity, and prevent ecological and climate damage.

Achieving global gender and climate justice takes all of us.

Please contribute to our important work by clicking https://www.genderaction.org/donate.html or mailing a check to Gender Action, 925 H Street NW, Suite 410, Washington DC 20001.

Thanks so much for your support and very Happy Holidays!

Warm regards,

HOME

Stay Connected!