Gender Action

Around the world, women assume a greater responsibility for unpaid care work than men. This work, which includes caring for children, sick, and the elderly, collecting fuel and water, cooking meals, harvesting food, and maintaining shelter is essential for daily life. Despite its importance, care work is not counted in the most common economic indicators, like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which IFIs use to measure a country's economy. Extensive unpaid care work results in persistent gaps in women's income, health, education, and basic welfare.&nbsp;<br /><br />Gender Action is a founding member of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.caringeconomy.org/"><strong>Caring Economy Campaign</strong></a>&nbsp;(CEC), which seeks to elevate care work and promote alternatives to GDP that capture not only economic growth but the mostly unmonetized unpaid home economy as well.&nbsp;

As the IFIs step up investments in environmentally-controversial infrastructure projects, such as fossil-fuel generating extractive industries, and manage increasingly larger climate investment funds, Gender Action is addressing their gender impacts. Gender disparities in decision making, property rights, access to information, and unequal divisions of labor mean women bear the brunt of IFI financed climate change impacts. Droughts, floods and natural disasters leave women more vulnerable to livelihood loss, disease, violence and even death.

In many developing countries, IFI investments do not address gender roles, creating projects and programs that can bypass and/or disadvantage women, reinforce women's poverty, and undermine poor women's and men's access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and HIV/AIDS services. IFIs like the World Bank emphasize their commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including those related to reducing maternal mortality, enhancing access to sexual and reproductive health care, and combating HIV/AIDS. It is widely understood that gender inequality undermines women's SRHR and fuels the spread of HIV. However, IFIs spend a tiny fraction of their multi-billion dollar budgets on population and sexual and reproductive health and HIV, according to Gender Action research.&nbsp;<br /><br />Through rigorous research and targeted campaigns, Gender Action advocates for increased IFI spending on SRHR and HIV/AIDS worldwide. In order for these investments to be truly effective, Gender Action also pressures IFIs to ensure a gender-sensitive focus in their investments and remove loan conditions which impede progress towards ensuring women's access to SRHR, HIV/AIDS care and protection from sexually transmitted infections. Gender Action also advocates for IFI grants only to end low-income countries' debt burden, which limits spending on health and other basic needs.&nbsp;<br /><br />Gender Action's qualitative and quantitative research on IFI investments and gender impacts provides the basis for developing resources and tools for civil society advocates on SRHR and HIV/AIDS. We advocate with other civil society partners for more money better spent by IFIs on SRHR and HIV/AIDS.

After the World Bank dropped reproductive health from its "Population, Health and Nutrition Strategy" draft in 2007, Gender Action helped coordinate civil society advocacy calling for its reinstatement.&nbsp;<br /><br /><strong >Gender Action's advocacy leadership pressured key World Bank Executive Directors to reject the draft and restore the World Bank's commitment to reproductive health.&nbsp;</strong>

Gender Action launched our new project on gender and food insecurity during the annual World Bank/International Monetary Fund Spring meetings in April of 2011, highlighting how IFI investments in agriculture, nutrition and rural development often exacerbate food insecurity in developing countries, and how women and girls disproportionately suffer harmful impacts.

Since Haiti's devastating earthquake in 2010, the World Bank approved almost a half billion dollars in new investments for Haiti, which Gender Action tracks and analyzes. Recent Gender Action publications have exposed missed opportunities in Bank Haiti agriculture projects to support gender equality and female farmers.&nbsp;<br /><br /><strong >In December 2011, the World Bank approved a new gender-sensitive project, "Relaunching Agriculture: Strengthening Agriculture Public Services II," which promises sex-disaggregated data and quotas for women's participation.&nbsp;</strong>

<p><strong>One in three girls</strong>&nbsp;around the world will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Many will be assaulted more than once. Gender-based violence (GBV) affects women and men, boys and girls around the world. Yet, International Financial Institutions (IFIs) hardly address GBV as a human rights issue or GBV against men and boys.</p><p>Although GBV is often considered to be the same as violence against women, GBV encompasses sexual violence against both men and women, boys and girls, and includes a broad range of human rights violations, including rape, domestic violence, human trafficking and forced pregnancy. Over the past decade, GBV has become an increasingly visible weapon of war and conflict.</p><p>Sometimes IFI rhetoric and research condemn GBV. However, there is a disconnect with IFI investments that mostly ignore GBV. Gender Action pressures the IFIs address GBV in their investments. Our initiatives include case studies and campaigns to end IFI exacerbation of GBV.</p><p>For example, our&nbsp;<a href="http://www.genderaction.org/images/boomtimeblues.pdf">Boom Time Blues</a>&nbsp;project revealed that the large uptick in the number of incidents of violence against women from the infusion of foreign workers was ignored by the World Bank and European Reconstruction Development Bank funded pipeline project. Boom Time Blues examined impacts of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan Export Oil Pipeline (BTC pipeline) in Azerbaijan and Georgia, and the Sakhalin II oil and gas project on Sakhalin Island off the northern Russian coast.</p>

For two years, Gender Action has engaged in persistent advocacy efforts, including blog posts and letters to President Obama, demonstrating that none of the World Bank's initial investments in post-earthquake Haiti addressed the country's growing epidemic of gender-based violence.&nbsp;<br /><br /><strong >In 2011, the World Bank approved its first grant to explicitly address gender-based violence in Haiti.&nbsp;</strong>