International development and gender: A return of the “invisible” woman?
Dr Adrian Bazbauers (@AdrianBazbauers) of the Public Service Research Group, UNSW Canberra discusses his new analysis of how multilateral development banks approach gender.
“Gender” has been a priority in international development for decades. Achieving gender equality, promoting gender empowerment, and ensuring that women and girls benefit from economic growth was reinforced by the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the current lodestar of international development.
The multilateral development banks (MDBs), a network of 32 international financial institutions operating across the world, greatly influence the trajectory of development practice. In 2020 alone, they approved $250 billion in new projects, loans, equity investments, guarantees, and technical assistance. As ‘market makers’, what they are willing to finance signals to public and private investors what are and are not feasible development projects.
Since the 1980s, the MDBs have steadily built mechanisms to “mainstream gender” in their organisations and have greatly expanded their gender-focused investment portfolios. This is an accomplishment. It is vital that women and girls are not excluded from development; they are disproportionately impacted globally by economic, social, and political inequalities. In 2022, UN Women published Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The Gender Snapshot 2022 which highlights that unless drastic change is made, ‘it may take close to 300 years to achieve full gender equality.’
And, so, it is important to understand and unpack how the MDBs are engaging with gender, especially since their engagement has often been controversially reviewed and uneven in practice. In a 2023 Women’s Studies International Forum article, I analyse four decades of MDB institutional gender documents – policies, strategies, and action plans – to evaluate how they have conceptualised and operationalised gender over time.
The development of gender in MDB operations
The rationale for why the MDBs engage with gender has been consistent for decades: the inherent importance of gender equality and women’s empowerment to alleviating poverty, building shared prosperity, reducing social vulnerability, and affirming human rights.
Yet, before the 1970s, gender was not really part of the development vocabulary. Women and girls were considered (if at all) as apart from productive economic growth. But, in the early 1970s, academic feminist analyses called for integrating women into development through financing women-focused projects and women-only organisations and expanding education, health, and employment services to women and girls.
Throughout the 1980s, a handful of MDBs attempted to adopt such an approach. Isolating women and girls as a special target group to be integrated into development, the MDBs sought to recognise the “invisible” woman in development, “invisible” because women ‘in many developing countries tend to be economically invisible’ and ‘are isolated in “female” employment.’
Not without criticism, it was at least an attempt by the MDBs to include women and girls. They were not, however, entirely successful in changing their organisations to embrace gender as a priority.
Mainstreaming gender and ‘retroliberalism’
The MDBs slowly came to adopt a new approach in the 1990s and 2000s. Spurred by the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and 2000 Millennium Development Goals, the MDBs attempted to “mainstream gender” in their organisations and shifted operational focus from women to the gender dynamics between women and men. MDB investment projects turned from integrating women into development to addressing the feminisation of poverty, supporting gender equality programs, developing community outreach initiatives, and rethinking the role and impact of men and boys in society. Again, not without criticism, but it was a considerable improvement over what little had been achieved in the 1980s.
Then the 2008 Global Financial Crisis changed the field of international development. A new global aid regime emerged that prioritised a return to economic growth as the main development outcome, a revised role for the state in sponsoring and facilitating the business, and the reframing of the private sector as an active development partner. We had entered era of “retroliberalism”.
How the MDBs approached gender consequently changed. Gone were rights-based concerns for the quality-of-life of women and girls and instead the MDBs devolved to integrating women into development but narrowly as private sector entrepreneurs. A woman- and not gender-focused throwback to the 1980s, but this time limited to women’s economic empowerment, employment opportunities, financial markets access, entrepreneurship, and asset ownership and control. Gender-focused projects now invested in entrepreneurial private sector opportunities and business skills training; gender equality and empowerment were reduced to matters of economic growth and market competitiveness.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in its 2016-2020 Strategy for the Promotion of Gender Equality advanced three priorities indicative of this new era:
To increase access to finance and business support for women-led businesses,
To increase access to employment opportunities and skills for women, and
To improve access to economic services.
As a more colourful – and troubling – illustration, the Inter-American Development Bank in 2013 approved a technical assistance project to Peru that proposed microfinance access and women’s economic empowerment would reduce the prevalence of intimate partner violence. With ‘one in three women worldwide experiencing physical or sexual violence,’ economic empowerment is important to minimising the vulnerability of women and girls. However, gender-based violence is multi-faceted and enabled by cultural, legal, economic, and political factors. It is questionable whether making entrepreneurs of individual women will address the systemic causes of physical and sexual violence.
Once again ‘invisible’?
Why does this matter? Cumulative MDB gender-focused investment projects peaked in the fifteen years since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Should we not celebrate the fact that there is more gender-focused projects than ever before? Yes. But the contents of these projects are a cause for unease.
Today, the MDBs are financing projects to make better economic units of women and girls for national development. Where is the concern for improving quality-of-life, alleviating gendered poverty, and addressing systemic gendered inequalities? The ‘market makers’ of international development are financing development projects – and thus signalling to public and private investors – that women’s productivity is more important than women themselves. The “invisible” woman in development has returned, for if women and girls are not private sector entrepreneurs they are once again unseen.
So, what could or should the MDBs be doing differently? We can consider their rationale for engaging with gender in the first place. To alleviate poverty, build shared prosperity, reduce social vulnerability, and affirm human rights, the MDBs may wish to remember that women and girls – that people – are more than their productive potential and that the inequalities facing societies cannot be resolved through economic growth alone.
Dr Adrian Robert Bazbauers is a Senior Lecturer in International Public Sector Management in the School of Business at UNSW Canberra.
This post is based on: Bazbauers, A. R. (2023). The multilateral development banks: Conceptualising and operationalising gender. Women’s Studies International Forum, 99, 102758. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102758
Post moderated by @DrSophieYates.