The Rio+20 Conference must address three critical areas of IFI investment—agriculture, extractive industries and climate financing—that are inextricably linked with gender inequality in order to fill current gaps in the sustainable development framework and face new and emerging challenges.
Women, who account for more than two thirds of the world’s poor and the majority of its small-scale farmers, bear the brunt of rising food prices and food insecurity in developing countries. Despite women’s critical role in food production, however, Gender Action’s Primer and country cases on IFIs, Gender and Food Insecurity show that IFIs have failed to translate their “gender-mainstreaming” rhetoric into action. In Ethiopia, for example, none of the World Bank’s current agriculture investments, totaling US$384 million, embrace a gender rights perspective, promote gender equality or analyze differential impacts on men and women. Inter-American Development Bank commercial agribusiness investments in post-earthquake Haiti are likely to weaken the country’s traditional small producer model, undermining women’s ability to earn income by participating in
cooperative agricultural activities that traditionally provide essential social programs, like daycare, for poor and vulnerable groups. World Bank investments also tend to ignore the devastating impacts of climate change on the natural environment, which rural women depend upon for their agricultural livelihoods. Droughts and extreme weather, which stem from climate change, undermine the health of natural environments and women’s ability to support themselves and their households.
 |
Women also suffer disproportionately from IFI-funded extractive industry projects, including oil transport and mining. For example, Gender Action’s newest publication, Broken Promises: Gender Impacts of the World Bank-Financed West African and Chad-Cameroon Pipelines, shows that gender-blind World Bank and European Investment Bank investments proved enormously profitable to transnational oil and gas companies, but failed to adequately protect vulnerable social groups in affected communities, particularly women, who most intensively manage natural resources. Based on fieldwork in Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo and Ghana, the report’s gender analyses reveal that the pipelines increased women's poverty and dependence on men; decreased women’s farming opportunities; caused ecological degradation that destroyed women's livelihoods; discriminated against women in employment and compensation; excluded women in consultation processes, and out of desperation, led to women’s increased prostitution.
It is no wonder that Gender Action's recent report, Governing Climate Funds: What will Work for Women? demonstrates that women and girls are often excluded from IFI-managed climate finance policies and programs. The World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) framework, for example, fails to address critical gender issues and actually reinforces gender insensitive policies and practices. Similarly, the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), currently the world’s largest financer of environmental projects, has found that the World Bank, its key implementing agency, is hardly proficient in “gender mainstreaming.” The World Bank’s lack of gender focus in climate-related investments undermines their effectiveness,
compromises the sustainability of their outcomes, and seriously calls the World Bank’s commitment to uphold gender equality in climate finance into question.
At the regional level, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) funds a “Clean Energy Program,” which aims to “meet energy security needs, facilitate a transition to a low-carbon economy, universal access to energy, and achieve ADB's vision of a region free of poverty.” The ADB aims to lend US$2 billion for related programs by 2013. None of the Clean Energy Program documentation, however, even mentions women and their energy needs.
As the world’s largest development “donors,” IFIs must be held accountable for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. In order to enhance its international framework for sustainable development, Rio+20 participants must pressure IFIs to treat women as change agents who are essential to the success of IFI food security and climate change interventions. Billions of poor women worldwide cannot afford to wait another twenty years for equality and justice.
Gender Action is the world’s only civil society organization dedicated to promoting women's rights and gender justice in all international financial institution (IFI) investments.
