About Gender Action

I just received an e-mail from Gender Action, and thought that other blog readers might be interested in knowing about the recent activities of this Washington, D.C.-based organization. The goal of Gender Action is to ensure equality of participation and benefits for both women and men in the investments of international financial institutions. I attended one of their presentations on gender awareness and World Bank programs.
Here's an excerpt from the e-mail from Gender Action's President Elaine Zuckerman, Programs Director Mande Limbu, and Programs Coordinator Anna Rooke (more information is available on the website):

Gender Action has been hard at work over the past six months developing advocacy campaigns, tools and research publications to hold the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) accountable on their promises to promote gender equality and empower women. Our sixth biannual Update looks back six months at the exciting work we’ve done and great strides we’ve made toward achieving this goal!
New Gender and Climate Change Program!
Last year, Gender Action produced its first paper on gender, climate change and the IFIs in April 2009: Doubling the Damage: World Bank Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) Undermine Climate and Gender Justice. This introductory paper, published with support from the Heinrich Boell Foundation, explores the linkages between climate change, gender justice and the World Bank’s new Climate Investment Funds. The paper outlines how the new Funds entirely ignore gender considerations, thus
undermining gender justice and disproportionately harming poor women.
Gender, Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS
Gender Action recently launched a new advocacy campaign called Leveraging IFI Funds for Reproductive Health & HIV/AIDS, which will pressure IFIs to increase and improve their spending on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, as well as remove their loan conditionalities which impede progress toward achieving the reproductive health and HIV/AIDS Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The campaign’s long-term goal is to increase the number of poor women, men, boys and girls with access to high-quality family planning, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS services in the global South. As of June 2009, 27 global and local organizations have joined the campaign!
Linking IFI-Watchers and Gender Justice Groups
Gender Action is bringing gender into the agendas of many existing IFI-watcher groups, which traditionally focused on the environment, transparency and accountability issues but neglected gender dimensions. We are also bringing IFIs into the work of gender justice and women’s rights groups, which have not yet addressed the IFIs.
Gender and Post-Conflict Reconstruction
In early 2009, Gender Action published The Gender Dimensions of Post-Conflict Reconstruction: The Challenges in Development Aid (Elaine Zuckerman & Marcia E. Greenberg) as a chapter in Making Peace Work: The Challenges of Social and Economic Reconstruction (Palgrave MacMillan, UNU-WIDER).

Look On! Considering "Bamako"

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Yes, I know. The movie "Bamako" was made back in 2006, times have changes, and I'm 3 years too late in recommending it. However, I had the opportunity to watch and consider "Bamako" for the first time this weekend, and believe that its message(s) continue(s) to be timely.
In the film, global financial and economic institutions are put on trial in a traditional village. The lives of the villagers go on around the litigants. The film's powerful critiques of the global financial institutions continue to resonate today, highlighting as they do the contradictory effects of development "aid" on African countries. Populations of countries wealthy in resources continue to be poor -- in fact, according to the film's witnesses for the prosecution, the countries and their populations are now poorer than they had been 5 decades ago. The two sides clash over, among other questions, the issue of whether the fault lies with the individual countries' internal corruption and/or incompetence. What is the role of the policies stemming from the ministrations of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank?
Already we are informed that Africa, although not fully integrated into the global economic and financial systems, is suffering the negative effects of the current worldwide crisis. U.K. Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has suggested the restructuring and revision of the global economic and financial system. Consensus on this issue is not imminent and, should one emerge, it will be hard fought.
World leaders and negotiators: Consider "Bamako"!

On December 23

On this day in ...

... 1948 (60 years ago today), 7 former leaders of Japan were executed for war crimes by hanging at Sugamo prison (left) in Tokyo. The previous month the group, which included Generals Hideki Tojo and Kenji Doihara, had been convicted following a 2-1/2-year trial before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. (photo credit)

... 1997, economic news was glum amid reports that Moody's Investors Services Inc., "one of the world's largest credit-rating agencies," had "downgraded the sovereign debt of South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand to 'junk' status." The move "seriously impair[ed] the countries' ability to raise the money needed to work through the region's wrenching downturn." Eventually the International Monetary Fund would step in, and economies seemed to be recovering 2 years later. (photo credit)

On September 26

On this day in ...
... 1946, Christine Todd Whitman (left) was born in New Jersey. She was that state's Governor from 1996 to 2001, resigning to serve 2 years as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The author of It's My Party Too (2005), Whitman now leads a consulting firm and is founding co-chair of the Republican Leadership Council, the goal of which "is to support fiscally conservative, socially tolerant candidates and to reclaim the word Republican."
... 2000, thousands of anti-globalization protesters confronted riot police in Prague, Czech Republic, during an International Monetary Fund/World Bank summit. The international meeting would be cut short a day. (photo credit)

On June 11

On this day in ...
... 1963 (45 years ago today), a Buddhist monk burned himself to death in Vietnam, to protest the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Witnesses said the monk, Thich Quang Duc, got out of a car at a busy intersection in the capital city of Saigon, sat in the lotus position as 2 other monks poured gasoline on him, and then ignited the fire, which consumed him in minutes.
... 2005, in London, finance minister from the Group of 8 wealthiest countries agreed to write off $55 billion of the debt owed by 19 of the world's poorest countries. Much of the debt was owed to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the African Development Bank.

On this day

On March 1, ...
... 2008 (today), is celebrated the 1st day of Women's History Month. Our prior post on this commemoration is here.
... 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924, which established a Peace Corps (logo at right) "responsible for the training and service abroad of men and women of the United States in new programs of assistance to nations and areas of the world, and in conjunction with or in support of existing economic assistance programs of the United States and of the United Nations and other international organizations." In a statement that can be read and heard here, Kennedy predicted that although "the life will not be easy, it will be rich and satisfying. For every young American who participates in the Peace Corps -- who works in a foreign land -- will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace." Since then, according to the Peace Corps' website, "more than 190,000 Peace Corps Volunteers have been invited by 139 host countries to work on issues ranging from AIDS education to information technology and environmental preservation."
... 1947, in Washington, D.C., 1 of the international organizations established as a result of the 1944 conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the International Monetary Fund (logo at left), began financial operations. Operating as an overseer of the global economy and as an international lender for development projects, the IMF's tripled in membership since its founding -- today it has 185 states parties.

Jamaica, Portia Simpson Miller and Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations

In his 2007 book, The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad tours the world (from Bandung to Cairo to La Paz, Belgrade to Havana) detailing the adventure of the countries of the Third World in the years of decolonization and its aftermath. In each city he describes the efforts of Third World leaders to create an alternative to the bipolar world of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, and the factors that led to the demise of that project.
In his chapter on Jamaica (Kingston: IMF-led Globalization), Prashad outlines the choices confronting Jamaica and other non-oil-producing countries in the Third World in the 1970s. Unable to pay its current account deficits and needing oil to run its industries, public sources and transportation system, Jamaica borrowed from Peter to pay Paul, sinking ever further into debt. According to Prashad, in 1976, the balance of payments deficit was $231.3 million. By 1982, the deficit was $612 billion and rising.
In addition to the other consequences stemming from the structural adjustment programs that were a condition of IMF bailout (cuts in educational, health and other social programs), Prashad describes the collapse of the Jamaican women’s movement that had initiated women’s liberation gains such as legislation providing for equal pay, minimum wage, maternity leave and de-bastardization of children born out of wedlock. The withdrawal of state funding demanded by the structural adjustment program lead to a weakening of the women’s movement and a retrenchment of their activities, as the women’s groups became dependent on funding from private foundation from the U.S. and the global North. Those funding sources pulled funding when groups engaged in “unacceptable political” activities.Today, Portia Simpson Miller is Jamaica’s first woman Prime Minister, acceding to power by winning the support of her colleagues in the ruling party in the lead-up to the resignation of previous Prime Minister, P.J. Patterson. However, Simpson Miller’s accession to power does not reflect a widespread acceptance of women’s leadership roles in Jamaican politics. General elections will take place on August 27, giving the Jamaican public the opportunity to express their approval or disapproval of her leadership.

A not so sweet deal?

À propos of the post above respecting a new politics of "global governance," check out "Noblesse Oblige at the World Bank," new column by our colleague José E. Alvarez, President of the American Society of International Law. It raises cogent questions about the "60 year old cozy handshake deal" by which the United States names the head of the World Bank and Europe the head of the International Monetary Fund. (The occasion for these questions is, of course, the hasty departure of Paul Wolfowitz and, consequently, President George W. Bush's nomination of Robert Zoellick.) Alvarez concludes:

Changing the way the Bank chooses its President and making sure that that President is above reproach are good ideas as matters of principle. They also make sense practically – if the Bank is to overcome the perception in borrowing countries that the Bank’s rule-of-law projects are the least effective of its efforts.