International Women's Day Call: IFIs Must Stop Contributing to Violence Against Women

2007/03/06 14:25:00 GMT+0530

United Kingdom

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.

Source: GCAP