Feminist Foreign Policy and Development Finance for Gender Equality: An Assessment of Commitments

2022

Increasingly aware of their potential role as catalysts for change, development donors have been strengthening their commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment, as evidenced in the growing number of gender equality strategies and other initiatives. The rhetoric, however, has not been consistently matched by equally ambitious commitments in Official Development Assistance (ODA).

Feminist foreign policies (FFP) and feminist development policies seek to bridge this gap by increasing funding, utilizing innovative delivery mechanisms, and ensuring long-term support for women’s equality organizations and institutions (WEOs)—the critical, but chronically under-funded agents of transformative change.

This brief uses publicly available data on bilateral allocable aid commitments by Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members with a feminist foreign policy and/or feminist development policy (namely Canada, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden) to provide aggregate and country-specific analysis of their gender-focused commitments, the sectors they prioritize, and their aid commitments for women’s equality organizations and institutions. In line with OECD methodology, our analysis uses data on commitments, rather than disbursements, since the gap between the two over time is very small and the former better reflect the changing political priorities of donors.