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 greatly contributing to engendering IFI policy.

Here are some examples:

• In spring 2007, Gender Action helped coordinate the emergency response from civil society to the World Bank’s proposed new Health, Nutrition and Population (HNP) Strategy, which threatened to eliminate the Bank’s 30-year-old support for reproductive health. This effort, which united the reproductive health and rights community with groups working on IFI issues, led key World Bank Executive Directors to reject the draft and restore commitment to family planning. The approved strategy, however, relegates discussion of reproductive health toward the end, and takes a retrograde position on health service user fees, reversing the Bank’s previous position to eliminate them. Gender Action continuously advocates removing IFI-imposed user fees which make health and education services unaffordable to the poor.

• Boom-Time Blues: Big Oil’s Gender Impacts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Sakhalin, jointly published by Gender Action and Central and Eastern European Bankwatch Network, spurred the World Bank to create a webpage dedicated to Extractive Industries and Gender which calls for “the improvement of the impact of extractive industries on women.” Gender Action continues its effective monitoring and advocacy to ensure that powerful Bank rhetoric reflects changes in investments.

• Gender Action pressure on the World Bank helped inspire the Bank's new Gender Action Plan (GAP) to respond to our criticisms that the Bank overlooks the harmful gender impacts of its policy-based loans and private sector investments (For example, see: Gender Guide to World Bank and IMF Policy-Based Lending). However, a footnote in the World Bank’s Gender Policy excluding policy-based operations undermines GAP’s intentions. Gender Action is pressuring to change this. Also responding to Gender Action's pressure, GAP is the first World Bank gender guideline claiming to apply to the entire World Bank Group including its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation. However, GAP still ignores the Bank Group’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency that guarantees foreign investments in developing countries.

• Gender Action's advocacy work in China has led the World Bank to recognize its neglect of gender considerations in assessing the impacts of large infrastructure projects. In response, World Bank water supply projects in China increasingly include women’s groups in project design, implementation and evaluation. (Women, the Environment and Infrastructure page).

• Gender Action fills the breach in advocacy for engendering new World Bank processes when the World Bank’s own gender unit is absent.  For example, in 2005, Gender Action suggested how the World Bank could integrate gender considerations into the Bank’s important new Country Systems Approach. The draft was insensitive to gender issues. In 2005 Gender Action proposed how to integrate gender considerations into the gender-insensitive IFC Draft Policy and Performance Standards on Social & Environmental Sustainability (see the International Accountability Project’s IFC Safeguard Policy Update).

• Mounting numbers of southern-country civil society groups and political leaders seek Gender Action’s help in engendering their macroeconomic policies, budgets, and projects (see the Countries page). 

• Global advocacy groups increasingly invite Gender Action’s participation in their IFI campaigning. In 2006-2007 alone, 50 Years Is Enough Network, ActionAid, The Center for International Environmental Law, Central and Eastern European Bankwatch Network, Environmental Law Institute and NGO Forum on ADB requested Gender Action collaboration to integrate gender concerns into their IFI-advocacy projects in countries around the world.

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