Both ENDS Policy Brief June 2017
International Financial Institutions and Gender Equality:
Connecting people for change
a contradiction in terms? Can International Financial Institutions (IFIs) play a role in achieving gender equality? Despite their claims to this effect, to date the evidence is thin at best. The decision by the World Bank to hand over responsibility for monitoring gender and environmental safeguards to oppressive governments, makes a positive contribution to women’s empowerment even more unlikely. ECONOMIC GROWTH AND EMANCIPATION: TWO SIDES OF THE SAME NARRATIVE The World Bank and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) argue that an important reason why women in developing countries are poor is because they do not participate enough in the formal economy. By investing in education, development banks aim to prepare women for a working life in the money economy. This will not only help women climb out of poverty, the IFIs argue; emancipation and gender equality are also considered inevitable outcomes of the economic development that they bring1. Women will be emancipated from their ‘traditional’ patriarchal society, and the male dominance and violence many of them suffer, by means of schooling, paid employment and, as a result, income independence. In a modern – read, economically advanced – society, it is suggested, women will no longer be neglected, denied their
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rights or discriminated against. But is it true that development banks foster women’s emancipation? CHEAP LABOUR AND A CIRCULAR CRISIS The IFI adagio is that economies should grow. Ongoing internationalisation of the economy is considered an effective way of realising this. The strategy has for a long time included the relocation of industries from overdeveloped to
underdeveloped countries, where a cheap labour force is still available. Women are schooled to work in, for instance, the electronic utensils or garments industries, which are often located in economic zones, where labour standards are applied much more loosely than what national laws dictate. For most women it means that they end up as part of their country’s cheap labour force, producing consumer goods for the world market, and barely scraping a living from their long working days.