Grassroots Women Urge Rights-Based Development Path

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  • Inter Press Service

The streets around the headquarters of the world's leading financial institutions — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have been transformed into a canvas over the last three days.

Emblazoned with this year's signature slogan of the Bretton Woods Institutions, 'Think Equal', the sidewalks in DC are now home to the campaign of the world's biggest bank that has, for the first time this year, placed the issue of gender at the centre of the development debate.

'We've just released a World Development Report on gender that proves that 'getting to equal' for women is not just the right thing to do. It's also smart economics,' World Bank Group president Robert Zoellick told a press conference here Thursday.

'Women are the next big emerging market - how can the world reach its full growth potential if it fails to advance the prospects, energies, and contributions of half the world's population — women and girls?' he asked. 'Nearly four million girls and women in developing countries 'go missing' each year,' Zoellick stressed. 'That's like losing a Los Angeles, a Johannesburg, a Yokohama.'

But while the WDR has been applauded for its efforts, many experts in the field, particularly those who have toiled in the grassroots against the impacts of neoliberal development, have concluded that the report offers much too little, much too late.

For instance, 'Why does the Bank only encourage us to 'think equal'? Why not call for us to 'act equal' as well?' Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College, asked the Bank's gender and development director Jeni Klugmen at a round-table discussion on Wednesday.

As organisations like the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) have consistently pointed out, full reproductive agency is a prerequisite to women's equality in the 21st century. 'The WDR 2012 highlights women's health during their reproductive years as a key priority,' Merrell Tuck- Primdahl, senior communications officer for development economics at the Bank, told IPS.

'This vital issue is covered as part of the main causes for excess female mortality in regions such as Sub Saharan Africa and as related to women's voices within the household and ability to control and decide the number and spacing of children they will have in their lifetime,' she added.

'Institutionally, the World Bank is a global leader in reproductive health, and we launched a new Reproductive Health Action Plan (RHAP) in 2010,' Tuck-Primdahl said. 'We are currently implementing the five-year plan to help countries improve their reproductive health outcomes,' she concluded.

But some experts believe that the Bank's failure to take a 'rights- based' approach to reproductive health limits its scope. 'The Bank does not see sexual and reproductive health as a human right, but instead as a necessity to maximise women's economic activity,' Elizabeth Arend, programmes coordinator for the Washington-based Gender Action, told IPS.

'As long as women are healthy, they are better able to be economically productive - this is the motivation behind the Bank's 'women's health' focus,' she said. According to Arend, this means focusing on only three issues: women's fertility through contraception promotion, maternal morbidity from malaria and HIV, and maternal mortality.

'Women around the world also suffer the psychological consequences of sexual violence, which is given outrageously little attention or funding. In fact, the Bank has only four active projects in the entire world to address gender-based violence, totaling only 12.5 million dollars. This is 0.02 percent of the Bank's FY2010 58.8- billion-dollar budget,' she added.

'This track record suggests that the WDR is highly unlikely to have any impact on the Bank's gender policies or investments since its investments in 'gender and social inclusion' have actually decreased in recent years, from six percent of the budget in FY2006 to two percent in 2010,' Arend told IPS.

Other civil society representatives are using the opportunity to identify the increasingly bitter conflict of interest between the Bank's research and its investments.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service