Economic policy reforms in the form of Structural Adjustment Loans or Programs (SALs or SAPs) are large IFI investments that require countries to restructure their economies. SAPs require painful restructuring of poor country economies. The common prescriptions include: price and trade "liberalization", public expenditure cutbacks, public service and enterprise privatization including privatizing basic needs like water and health, introducing regressive taxation like VATs, and other economically difficult measures. Often these measures raise unemployment by pushing the new jobless and the already poor into deeper poverty. Multinational corporations benefit most from these measures, for example, from privatizing water and requiring unreciprocated unilateral trade tariff removal. Poor people suffer from these measures carried out in the name of poverty reduction.

SAPs have also been known as Sector Adjustment Loans, Economic Recovery Credits, Structural Adjustment Facilities (SAFs), Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs) and Development Support Credits (DSCs). Due to pressure from civil society groups regarding the negative human impacts of SAPs, often they have been renamed Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs) in the case of the World Bank and Poverty Reduction Growth Facilities (PRGFs) in the case of the IMF to indicate their close tie to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Despite their poverty reduction names, PRSCs and PRGFs perpetuate classic structural adjustment programs that undermine poverty reduction.

Gender Action monitors the gender impacts of these programs and carries out advocacy with local partners to mitigate harmful effects of donor-driven structural adjustments programs on low-income women and men.

Women are the first to lose jobs and the last to be rehired in public sector downsizing because they are unfairly assumed to be secondary breadwinners although in reality increasing numbers of households are female headed. Their work at home tends to increase with the loss of child and health care programs. This squeezes out their time they can spend searching for new work and earning when they find jobs.

Men who lose jobs often turn to drinking and domestic violence rises. The IFIs have barely addressed these destructive trends.

With local partners, Gender Action launched its first Structural Adjustment's Gendered Impacts program in Serbia and Montenegro where over 80 percent of World Bank investments have supported SAPs. Our Serb partners, the Belgrade-based Association for Women's Initiatives, found the privatization program did not consider any data on the social profile of employees who lose their jobs in restructured enterprises. They concluded, "Without such data it is not possible to create specific support programs to increase self-employment, SME development and, job creation."