Gender Action

Gender Action played a lead role in convincing the World Bank to establish an interdisciplinary Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Task Force around 2014, hire its first-ever SOGI Global Adviser, and finance studies to analyze investment costs of homophobia/transphobia.
Since then, Gender Action has been pushing all International Financial Institutions to uphold all genders including LGBTQ+ people’s rights.

In many developing countries, IFI investments do not address gender roles, creating projects and programs that can bypass and/or disadvantage women, reinforce women's poverty, and undermine poor women's and men's access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and HIV/AIDS services. IFIs like the World Bank emphasize their commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including those related to reducing maternal mortality, enhancing access to sexual and reproductive health care, and combating HIV/AIDS. It is widely understood that gender inequality undermines women's SRHR and fuels the spread of HIV. However, IFIs spend a tiny fraction of their multi-billion dollar budgets on population and sexual and reproductive health and HIV, according to Gender Action research. Through rigorous research and targeted campaigns, Gender Action advocates for increased IFI spending on SRHR and HIV/AIDS worldwide. In order for these investments to be truly effective, Gender Action also pressures IFIs to ensure a gender-sensitive focus in their investments and remove loan conditions which impede progress towards ensuring women's access to SRHR, HIV/AIDS care and protection from sexually transmitted infections. Gender Action also advocates for IFI grants only to end low-income countries' debt burden, which limits spending on health and other basic needs. Gender Action's qualitative and quantitative research on IFI investments and gender impacts provides the basis for developing resources and tools for civil society advocates on SRHR and HIV/AIDS. We advocate with other civil society partners for more money better spent by IFIs on SRHR and HIV/AIDS.

One in three girls around the world will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Many will be assaulted more than once. Gender-based violence (GBV) affects women and men, boys and girls around the world. Yet, International Financial Institutions (IFIs) hardly address GBV as a human rights issue or GBV against men and boys.
Although GBV is often considered to be the same as violence against women, GBV encompasses sexual violence against both men and women, boys and girls, and includes a broad range of human rights violations, including rape, domestic violence, human trafficking and forced pregnancy. Over the past decade, GBV has become an increasingly visible weapon of war and conflict.
Sometimes IFI rhetoric and research condemn GBV. However, there is a disconnect with IFI investments that mostly ignore GBV. Gender Action pressures the IFIs address GBV in their investments. Our initiatives include case studies and campaigns to end IFI exacerbation of GBV.
For example, our Boom Time Blues(http://www.genderaction.org/images/boomtimeblues.pdf)  project revealed that the large uptick in the number of incidents of violence against women from the infusion of foreign workers was ignored by the World Bank and European Reconstruction Development Bank funded pipeline project. Boom Time Blues examined impacts of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan Export Oil Pipeline (BTC pipeline) in Azerbaijan and Georgia, and the Sakhalin II oil and gas project on Sakhalin Island off the northern Russian coast.