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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:
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Gender Action
1875 Connecticut Street NW
Suite 500
Washington DC 20009 USA
Contributions made by US residents to Gender Action, a 501(c)3
non-profit organization, are tax-deductible.
Gender Action 2011 Annual Fundraising Letter
Dear Friends,
What better way to share Gender Action's recent accomplishments than through African partners' feedback?
Based on working closely with Gender Action throughout 2010-11, Betty Abah, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria's Project Officer and Gender Focal Person, wrote:
"Working with Gender Action since last year on the project, 'The Gender Impacts of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipelines and the West African Gas Pipelines' (covering Nigeria, Ghana, Togo and Cameroon) 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. My working experience with Gender Action has stirred in me a determination to be more committed, more selfless and determined to see results in my work back home in Nigeria and across the West African and Central African regions. I very much look forward to working with Gender Action again!"
You might be thinking--pipelines again! Didn't International Financial Institutions (IFIs) learn anything from Gender Action's 2006 Boom Time Blues (BTB)? Our BTB report showed--through fieldwork with Central and Eastern Europe Bankwatch-- that World Bank-financed oil pipelines employed males but harmed women, who lost traditional income as pipelines appropriated their farmland. This raised women's dependence on men, drove women into sex work, and increased STDs, especially HIV, and violence against women. Stillbirths from pipeline pollution leaks soared. In response to Boom Time Blues, the World Bank created a gender and extractive industries unit and website.
Yet our new Broken Promises report -- a collaboration with several West African partners that Betty Abah described above -- revealed similar tragic impacts on women. Broken Promises implores the World Bank to stop investing in polluting pipelines which can increase stillbirths, cancer, prostitution, HIV, and trigger other tragic outcomes. Broken Promises uses a key Gender Action strategy, empowering grassroots groups to collect field
data for advocacy on their governments which take IFI loans and on IFIs directly, to improve IFI investment's gender impacts.
Although lessons sometimes evade IFIs, we expect that Broken Promises will improve World Bank investments. This is because repeatedly exposing IFI investments' harmful impacts, based on research from citizen actors like Gender Action's local partners, does strengthen IFI behavior.
For example, since Haiti's devastating January 2010 earthquake, Gender Action's persistent tracking, analysis and advocacy to improve IFI investments' gender and other social impacts influenced the: (1) World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank to cancel all past Haitian IFI debt and provide only grants going forward, an unprecedented move that frees up funds for social investments; and (2) the World Bank to approve an investment addressing gender-based violence in Haiti. Since Gender Action exposed that none of the first half billion dollars in IFI post-earthquake grants to Haiti dealt with swelling numbers of rape victims living in flimsy shelters, the World Bank approved its first Haiti project to prevent sexual assault and assist rape survivors.
Elsewhere, Gender Action is also catalyzing citizen activism in holding IFIs and borrowing governments accountable. Recent unsolicited feedback from Gender Action project partner Christian Tanyi, CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation (LUKMEF), Cameroon, highlights how:
"Our [joint] project is proving far more important, informative and empowering, as 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. Both the government and the [development] banks are now worried by the project as no such in-country and intensive site visits and questioning has been done outside their own commissioned evaluations. I definitely think that whoever would want to help Africa should support our joint project to keep governments and these funders open and transparent. It may be interesting to also know that as a result of our findings and the reactions of communities and NGOs we interacted with during this project, we are now considering a major multiple year accountability project to
continue the work you have helped us start."
Christian and Betty's stories and our advocacy experiences in Haiti demonstrate how Gender Action is step-by-step closing the enormous gap between IFIs' strongly gender-sensitive rhetoric and mostly gender-blind investments.
Gender Action operates on a shoestring budget. Seeing Gender Action's effectiveness, people repeatedly remark that we must have 50-100 staff, but Gender Action's actual team consists of 4 committed, resourceful, and dynamic change-leaders. It is hard to beat Gender Action for a high social return on your donation.
I hope that you will contribute to Gender Action to sustain our critical work ensuring that the world's largest public "aid" funds improve the wellbeing of poor women, men, girls and boys. Through Gender Action, you direct your taxpayer development funds to combat gender-based violence, food insecurity, conflict and other priorities described in our enclosed brochure and at www.genderaction.org. Your individual tax-deductible donation will help achieve Gender Action's vision of a world where poverty diminishes and stops feminizing.
Thanks for your support!
With great appreciation and warm wishes,
Elaine Zuckerman,
President
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