The lack of consistent attention to gender was concerning, as was the failure to tackle the Global South debt crisis – and the blinkered expansion of private finance, despite evidence of its harms. But, says Rachel Noble, as the world turns to implementation of the Financing for Development commitments, there are valuable opportunities to seize and build on, including for the women who do most of the world’s care work.
How can the world plug the estimated $4 trillion annual gap in development financing – including a $420 billion annual gap in financing for gender equality?
That massive development financing deficit was the critical question being addressed at the recent 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) in Seville, Spain. The summit, bringing together world leaders, international financial institutions, UN agencies, the private sector, and civil society, was the culmination of months of fraught negotiations between governments from the Global North and South.
For feminist and queer movements and their allies in wider civil society, including Oxfam, the key to resolving the financing crisis lies in fixing a colonial, patriarchal and racist economic system that enables the super-rich 1% in the Global North to extract US$30million every hour from the Global South. This extraction includes 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care and domestic work by women every day – without which the economy would grind to a halt – as well as women’s underpaid labour, with women earning just 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Outside, record-breaking temperatures were a glaring reminder of the climate crisis being driven by this same GDP-growth obsessed economic model – a crisis experienced most acutely by those least responsible: women, non-binary people, Indigenous peoples and racialised communities in the Global South. Meanwhile, high security and harassment and exclusion of civil society both from key spaces at the conference and during the last and decisive stage of the negotiations in the preceding months served as disturbing examples of the shrinking space for civil society to engage in such critical discussions.
A lack of UK leadership amid a gender rights backlash
Oxfam GB and other UK economic justice organisations were disappointed that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was not among the 50 heads of state to attend, missing a chance to prove the UK’s stated commitment to international development and gender equality.
Such a demonstration of commitment is even more vital given the devastating aid cuts by the UK – alongside similar cuts by many other governments – with dedicated gender spending particularly at risk. It is also important given the ongoing rollbacks of gender rights globally, with numerous countries fiercely opposing gendered language in the outcome document, the Compromiso de Sevilla, which had been agreed by member states two weeks earlier.
As a result, the Compromiso makes no mention of the importance of financing sexual and reproductive health and rights, and invisibilises LGBTQIA+ communities, who face particularly acute forms of economic exclusion because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Ironically, the conference overlapped with Pride month, where the visibility and rights of queer and gender non-conforming people are celebrated and advocated for, including with a parade in Seville.
Feminist movements out in force
Nonetheless, thanks to the hard-fought advocacy of feminist movements and support from progressive member states, a dedicated “gender paragraph” survived in the outcome document. This includes important commitments to redress women’s disproportionate unpaid care and domestic workloads through investments in the care economy, as well as to eliminate gender- based violence.
During the conference itself, Global South feminist movements and gender justice advocates were out in force, with numerous high-level side events, feminist spaces, and vibrant activism. This included a ‘Red Flag Campaign’, spearheaded by the FFD4 Feminist Forum, where participants displayed red scarves and flags during the civil society march held on the eve of the conference. The Feminist Forum also launched a Declaration, signed by over 100 organisations from around the world, calling out the shortcomings of the Compromiso and demanding “a rights-based, environmentally just, decolonial, intersectional, sustainable, and people-centred economic model that centres care, reparations, redistribution, and accountability”.
Elsewhere however, discussions of gender remained glaringly absent, including during the high-level opening plenary. This raises immediate concerns about the commitments in the Compromiso to mainstream gender equality and gender-responsive solutions across the FFD4 agenda.
Unjust debt burdens will still hold back many countries
The reality is that the Compromiso falls far short of what is needed to redress the structural injustices baked into the global financial architecture since the beginning of the colonial era, including the gendered, racialised inequalities this system perpetuates within and between countries. Since the last FFD conference in 2015, the world’s richest one per cent increased their wealth by more than $33.9 trillion, enough to eliminate annual poverty 22 times over.
One key demand of civil society and many Global South countries that failed to make it into the final text was for the creation of a UN convention on sovereign debt to address the root causes of the debt crisis gripping numerous countries in the Global South, and ensure these countries have an equal voice at the table.
The UK and other global North countries consistently blocked this demand, arguing instead for reforms to existing initiatives and frameworks, despite the fact these will fail to deliver lasting debt solutions. Low- and middle-income countries spend 48% of their budgets on debt repayments, often to rich private creditors based in New York and London; that is more than their education and health spending combined.
As well as exacerbating women’s heavy and unequal unpaid care and domestic workloads, and denying them access to decent work, education, and political decision-making, such under-investment can literally be lethal for women. The Democratic Republic of Congo has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, but less than half the number of required nurses. In just four months the country spends as much on debt as it would cost to pay the annual salary for all 141,000 extra nurses needed to provide healthcare for all.
The flawed push for private finance continues
Another concern was the continued emphasis on private finance as the solution to financing gaps, rather than public finances that could be raised through taxing the super-rich, resolving the debt crisis, and Global North countries delivering on aid commitments. Oxfam has found efforts to incentivise and subsidise private finance has not only mobilised paltry sums, but has also led to a host of harms.
That includes human rights violations and gendered harms in privatized for-profit hospitals funded by the UK’s development finance institution, British International Investment (BII). Yet, at FFD, the UK was ratcheting up its support for such approaches and the role of the City of London within them, including by leading or supporting a number of Seville Platforms for Action (SPAs) – the main mechanisms that are meant to turn FFD commitments into action – that focus on mobilising private capital.
But important opportunities remain and should be seized
With the conference over, the long, hard work of implementation now begins. Despite its shortcomings, there are elements of the Compromiso de Sevilla – such as the commitments to invest in care, to initiate a UN intergovernmental process on debt, to advance measures of progress beyond GDP, and to enhance efforts to more effectively tax high-net worth individuals – that offer important windows for action.
Oxfam and others across civil society will be looking to seize and build on these opportunities. We are facing a care emergency, an inequality emergency, and a climate emergency, which risk further eroding human rights and rollbacks on gender equality. Meaningful action and public financing commensurate with these challenges is urgently needed by member states.
Other initiatives launched at the conference include a SPA on investing in care systems (which Oxfam has signed up to, and the UK government will hopefully join us), a SPA on investing in gender equality more widely, as well as SPAs on taxing the super-rich and on beyond GDP.
For these initiatives to be successful, they must be led by Global South countries and seek to tackle intersecting inequalities with gender-responsive actions whilst aligning with national development strategies. They need to recognize care and access to critical services such as health and education as a human right and a public good which the state has the duty to uphold. And they must be transparent, accountable, and include the voices and priorities of feminist networks and movements.
Now the UK must lead and put its words on gender justice into action
In her official statement at the summit, the UK’s international development minister Baroness Chapman recognised the need to “put women and girls at the heart of everything that we do”. As we move to implementation after Seville, it is vital that the UK government use its voice in processes such as FFD to speak out more boldly and loudly in support of gender justice and, crucially, turn these words into transformative action.
This must include shifting to a public finance first approach; meeting its aid commitments; implementing domestic legislation on tackling debt; and constructively engaging in UN-led initiatives for reforms to the global debt and tax architecture. These are the most transformative things the UK can do to ensure Global South countries have the resources they need to invest in high-quality, gender-responsive public services and infrastructure that are vital to redressing women’s unequal care loads, realising gender justice and tackling global inequalities.
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Find out more: read Oxfam’s briefing paper, “From Private Profit to Public Power: Financing Development, Not Oligarchy”, released for the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville