WUNRN
Gender
Action drafted the call below for the International Financial Institutions
(IFIs) to stop contributing to violence against women, the feminization of
poverty, and the spread of HIV/AIDS through harmful projects and policy
conditionalities.
We call
for an open, independent, transparent audit of IFI loans. So long as the
IFIs continue operating, we demand that they stop attaching harmful policy
prescriptions to their loans, require mandatory independent gender impact
assessments for all projects, and meaningfully strengthen their safeguards to
protect women and members of vulnerable groups.
Please send organizational and
individual endorsements to suzannad@genderaction.org
by March 6th, 2007.
Gender Action
Website:
***
International Women’s Day
Call:
IFIs Must Stop Contributing to
Violence Against Women
The theme of
International Women’s Day 2007 is Ending Impunity for Violence Against
Women. Gender-blind International Financial Institution (IFI)
operations—those of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the
regional development banks—financing private-corporate led growth, debt
repayment, and low inflation and public spending often aggravate existing
discrimination against women and girls, particularly among marginalized groups
such as indigenous peoples. Such IFI investments
intensify poverty, human displacement, trafficking in and violence against
women, prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS, sexual
harassment, and sexual assault.
The IFIs may not intend their
investments to contribute to violence against women, but the impacts are all too
real.
For example, the International Finance Corporation and European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development-funded Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, supposedly
designed to boost development, has degraded the environment, driven many women
and girls in communities around the pipeline into prostitution, and increased
sexually transmitted diseases, sexual harassment and violence against
women. The East Asian financial crisis—brought on ten years
ago largely by bad IMF advice designed to stimulate foreign investment—strained
household gender relations, increasing domestic violence against women and
girls, family abandonment by household heads, and female suicide.
Over the last 25
years
harmful IMF-imposed policies designed to contain government deficits
have slowed growth rates, amplified the gap between the rich and the poor, and
increased poverty and unemployment in the developing world.
The impacts on women and girls—who constitute 70% of the world’s
poor—have been disastrous. IMF agreements often impose caps
on public spending, limiting governments’ ability to provide essential
services. Public health spending cutbacks increase the
suffering of women and girls, who are forced to drop out of school and decrease
their working hours to care for sick family members. Lack of
education increases girls’ likelihood of contracting HIV/AIDS.
And despite World Bank and IMF rhetoric about the importance of spending
on social services, the major increases in government spending on health and
education necessary to lift women and girls out of poverty, combat HIV/AIDS, and
meet the Millennium Development Goals are impossible under the tight fiscal and
monetary policy framework required by the IMF.
The World Bank and regional
development banks also impose harmful policies on developing countries that
disproportionately impoverish women and girls. These include
wage caps on teachers’, doctors’, and nurses’ salaries; services and
infrastructure privatization; and trade liberalization. Yet
the World Bank’s Operational Policy on Gender and Development that calls for all
World Bank operations to promote gender equality does not apply to policy-based
loans.
All the IFIs have committed to
promote gender equality. The Asian
Development Bank, African Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and
World Bank all have strategies, policies or action plans to address gender
issues. On March 7th, 2003, the leaders of the
most prominent IFIs proclaimed, “We, the Heads of the Multilateral Development
Banks/International Monetary Fund, affirm the importance of promoting gender
equality and empowering women for achieving the Millennium Development
Goals.” They went on to say, “we affirm our continued
commitment to promoting gender equality in our organizations and in the work of
our organizations to assist member countries.” These
commitments remain largely empty, or are negated by weak IFI safeguards against
the negative impacts of risky investments.
Harmful
impacts on women may be unintentional, but in almost all cases they are
reasonably foreseeable. We call for an
open, independent, transparent audit of past loans and compensation where
appropriate. So long as the IFIs continue operating, we
demand that they stop attaching harmful policy prescriptions to their loans,
require mandatory independent gender impact assessments for all projects, and
meaningfully strengthen their safeguards to protect women and members of
vulnerable groups.
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