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In conjunction with Gender Action's programs that target economic
policies that violate women's human rights, Gender Action’s
dedicated Women's Rights advocacy program ensures that IFIs
promote women's property and political rights, address gender-based
violence and respond to the feminization of HIV/AIDS and newly
emerging forms of exploitation including the growing global
challenge of trafficking in women and children.
As part of this program, Gender Action advocates for and
conducts policy analysis of IFI safeguards. For example, a
December 2007 Gender
Action analysis found that the Asian Development Bank's
draft Safeguard Policy Updates failed to protect women's rights
and gender equality. This analysis belongs to a consolidated
effort with partner civil society organizations to halt the
ADB's attempts to weaken its safeguards. In 2005, Gender
Action analyzed the International Finance Corporation's
proposed Policy and Performance Standards on Social &
Environmental Sustainability and found an alarming lack of
gendered analysis. Our findings were presented to the IFC
Board which largely ignored them. This experience with the
IFC exemplifies the pitfalls of responding to IFI requests
for inputs from civil society, which IFIs often ignore, then
use to legitimize flawed consultation processes.
In June 2007 we released The
Gender Dimensions of Post-Conflict Reconstruction: The World
Bank Track Record that provides an in-depth and gender
analysis of World Bank loans to post-conflict countries and
Post-Conflict Fund grants. We found that the majority of Bank
Post Conflict Reconstruction (PCR) investments ignore gender
issues and reinforce patriarchal patterns. Therefore, we recommend
that Bank PCR investments systematically address violations
against women's rights and promote gender equality to make
peace work. This report builds on The
Gender Dimensions of Post-Conflict Reconstruction: The Challenges
in Development Aid published in June 2006 by the World
Institute for Development Economics Research. See our other
work on PCR on the Publications
Page.
In September 2007, Gender Action completed the first report
- titled Mapping
Multilateral Development Banks' Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS
Spending - to determine the quantity and quality of all
IFI spending for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. It provides
evidence-based analysis to influence IFI investments in these
areas. Mapping demonstrates a decline in World Bank funding
for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS in recent years and very
little spending by the African Development Bank, Asian Development
Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank on these themes.
It maps mostly unmet IFI commitments to reproductive health
and HIV/AIDS, and juxtaposes how harmful IFI loan conditionalities
such as restricting public spending undermine governments’
ability to address these public health imperatives.
Our report could not have been timelier. It coincided with
advocacy by the reproductive health and rights community around
the World Bank’s Health, Nutrition and Population Strategy
released in April 2007 which threatened to eliminate the Bank’s
30 year old support for reproductive health. Gender Action
helped coordinate the emergency response from civil society,
which led key members of the World Bank’s Executive
Directors to reject the draft and restore commitment to family
planning. The approved strategy, however, relegates discussion
of reproductive health toward the end. It 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.
Gender Action's work in this program area is extensive. In
August 2007 Gender Action and the Center for International
Environmental Law (CIEL) published Gender
Justice: A Citizen's Guide to Gender Accountability at International
Financial Institutions. This comparative guide on IFI
gender policies and accountability mechanisms includes steps
on how to take cases to each IFI accountability mechanism.
This project will help people harmed by gender discrimination
in IFI projects to take their complaints to IFI accountability
mechanisms for the first time. Gender Action and CIEL are
following up with advocacy and trainings to strengthen gender
accountability at the IFIs.
On International Women’s Day, 2007, Gender Action led
a Call signed by 126
organizations and individuals around the world condemning
IFI investments for intensifying poverty, trafficking in and
violence against women, prostitution, and sexually transmitted
diseases including HIV/AIDS. The Call insists that so long
as the IFIs continue to operate, they must stop attaching
policy prescriptions to their loans which deepen poverty and
must strengthen safeguards to protect women and other vulnerable
groups. Gender Action, collaborating with 50 Years Is Enough
Network, aroused considerable press publicizing around our
Call.
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