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Despite its young life and very modest resources, Gender Action
is recognized for its leading role promoting gender considerations
in IFI policies and investments (see Press/News
Clippings page). Whether indirectly advocating gender
inclusion to the IFIs through Gender Action's widely cited
publications (see Publications
page), building the capacity of country stakeholders through
training events and consultative meetings (see Country
Focus page), directly engaging the World Bank and other
IFIs through public forums (see Events
page), and expanding the networks of partners pressuring the
IFIs to be more accountable on meeting their gender promises,
Gender Action is contributing to engendering IFI policy and investments.
"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
Examples of our past achievements include:
World Bank:
Women's/Human Rights
For over a decade, Gender Action has pushed the World Bank to advance women's and men's equal human rights, as the Bank had unilaterally promoted women's empowerment as an instrument to achieve economic development.
The Bank's 2012 flagship World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development upholds women's rights as a "core objective in itself."
Inter-American Development Bank: Women's/Human Rights
Gender Action made human rights a key point during 2009-2010 civil society consultations on the IDB's new Operational Policy on Gender Equality in Development.
The IDB's new 2012 Operational Policy on Gender promotes women's/ human rights and includes specific institutional indicators to ensure the policy's effective implementation and evaluation.
World Bank: Agriculture and Food Security
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.
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.
World Bank: Gender-Based Violence
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.
In 2011, the World Bank approved its first grant to explicitly address gender-based violence in Haiti.
IFIs and Debt
Through advocacy with the Jubilee Debt Network and Gender Action's own letter to Obama, Gender Action persistently fought for IFIs to cancel impoverished Haiti's substantial IFI debt in order to free up funding for health, education and other basic needs.
In an unprecedented move, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Monetary Fund and World Bank cancelled all past Haitian debt by mid-2010; the IDB and World Bank also committed to make only grants for Haiti going forward.
World Bank:
Reproductive Health 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.
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.
World Bank:
Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS
In 2007, Gender Action published "Mapping Multilateral Development Banks' Spending on Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS," the first report to examine IFIs commitments to promote reproductive health and prevent and treat HIV. The report revealed that reproductive health and HIV constituted a tiny fraction of IFI spending between 2003 and 2006, and that most projects failed to address critical gender issues, such as gender inequality, sexual violence, and men's role in promoting maternal health.
While IFIs still spend a tiny fraction of their budgets on reproductive health and HIV, the World Bank has improved its approach to these issues by: 1) strengthening its Gender Action Plan focus on reproductive health; 2) approving a strong Reproductive Health Action Plan (2010-2015), which address gender inequality and women's human rights; and 3) including HIV and gender-based violence as priority areas in its 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality.
World Bank: Gender and Extractive Industries
Gender Action's 2006 report, "Boom Time Blues," based on fieldwork with Central and Eastern European Bankwatch, exposed how World Bank oil and gas pipeline investments in Central Asia employed males almost exclusively while disproportionately harming women's traditional farm livelihoods, raising women's dependence on men, driving women into sex work, and increasing sexually-transmitted infections-especially HIV/ AIDS, violence against women and stillbirths. Gender Action's 2011 report, "Broken Promises," based on fieldwork with local Friends of the Earth member groups, exposed similar negative gender impacts around IFI-financed oil and gas pipelines in western and central Africa.
In response to "Boom Time Blues," the World Bank created and staffed a gender and extractive industries unit and webpage; the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development launched its first Gender Action Plan; and the Inter-American Development Bank instituted Gender Safeguards (see "IDB Gender Safeguards"). In response to "Broken Promises," the World Bank's Inspection Panel indicated that it would be willing to consider a first-ever gender discrimination case.
World Bank: Climate Finance
Shortly after the World Bank published its multilateral Climate Investment Fund (CIF) framework, Gender Action's 2009 report, "Doubling the Damage," critiqued the CIF's lack of gender sensitivity.
CIF members in 2010 adopted their first Strategic Environment, Social and Gender Assessment to provide IFIs and recipient member countries with a framework for managing the social and gender impacts of CIF activities.
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB): Gender Safeguards
Gender Action's 2006 "Boom Time Blues" (see "World Bank: Gender and Mining") influenced IDB's gender experts to try to prevent harmful impacts on women that IFIs often cause.
IDB's Gender Equality Policy is the first IFI gender policy to include safeguards to prevent Boom Time Blues-like harms and "identify and address adverse impacts on gender equality" (IDB website).
World Bank:
China and Water
Gender Action's 2003 report, "Reforming the World Bank: Will the New Gender Strategy Make a Difference? A Study with China Case Examples," exposed how World Bank infrastructure projects like water neglected gender considerations.
In response, the World Bank began to systematically include women in the design of water supply projects in China.
IFI Advocacy: Linking IFI Watchers and Gender Justice Groups
Gender Action has shared gender analysis skills in capacity-building workshops and other technical assistance such as our Gender Toolkit for International Finance-Watchers to numerous global and southern partner IFI-watcher groups.
Groups that traditionally critiqued IFIs for environmental and other accountability issues but lacked a gender focus have now added gender dimensions to their IFI advocacy, powerfully multiplying Gender Action's own IFI-watching. These partners include the Bank Information Center (BIC), the Bretton Woods Project, Jamaa Resources Institute in Kenya, Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation (LUKMEF) in Cameroon, National Association for Women's Action in Development (NAWAD) in Uganda, and Friends of the Earth member groups in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Togo.
 "Our project [with Gender Action] 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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