Following foreign-aid cuts in donor countries, many developing countries have implemented austerity measures, to the detriment of women’s jobs, services, and protections. But donors and policymakers can deliver shared gains by investing in women’s rights organizations and embracing gender-based budgeting.
ACCRA/BUENOS AIRES/COLOMBO – Across the Global South, painful austerity measures such as benefit caps, pay freezes, and subsidy cuts have followed donor governments’ recent cuts to foreign aid. The policy pivot has had an especially dramatic impact on women – costing them jobs, services, and protections – and is causing widespread economic hardship in many developing countries. Against this backdrop of shortsightedness, “Give to gain,” the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day, reminds us that investing in women yields outsize returns. As former World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick once put it, “Gender equality is the right thing to do. And it is also smart economics.” Budgets are never neutral: Policy choices, from supporting extractive industries to weakening health systems, can erode women’s livelihoods, augment the burden of unpaid care work, and increase poverty rates. Today, 708 million women are outside the labor force because of care responsibilities, reflecting policymakers’ failure to recognize or value such work. Moreover, the International Monetary Fund has found that gender-responsive budgeting improves resource allocation and transparency by shifting financing away from harmful policies and toward priority areas such as income support for survivors, childcare, and workplace safety. If national budgets do not account for women’s rights, fiscal frameworks will continue to create vulnerabilities. Women’s rights begin with physical security. In 2016, United Nations Women estimates that gender-based violence cost roughly $1.5 trillion per year, or around 2% of global GDP at the time. Intimate partner violence alone can drain 1.2-3.7% of GDP – more than many countries spend on education. And workplace harassment and violence against women causes $6 trillion in global losses each year. With the right strategies, policymakers can stem these losses and deliver shared gains. But a major obstacle is that women’s rights organizations – which are best positioned to address gendered poverty and violence – face persistent funding gaps. When frontline groups lose flexible, multiyear core support, reform efforts fall short. Providing grants to organizations that are working to dismantle barriers to decent work, economic participation, and social equality is a proven solution. With direct funding, these trusted community groups can co-design projects, respond quickly to emerging needs, ensure that essential services are maintained, support informal workers, and mobilize collective action that drives lasting structural change. This is what “give to gain” looks like in practice. Examples of such interventions abound. The African Women’s Development Fund supports rural women’s groups on the continent in contesting land grabs and building cooperatives to raise incomes. In Latin America and the Caribbean, Fondo de Mujeres del Sur supports domestic workers’ unions and income-generating cooperatives for former women inmates to improve access to labor rights and decent employment. The Women’s Fund Asia complements efforts by migrant and informal workers to organize for fair wages and social protection. The International Indigenous Women’s Forum finances campaigns to defend indigenous territory, sustain local economies, and preserve natural ecosystems. These four women’s funds manage Leading from the South, a feminist philanthropic alliance dedicated to applying this grassroots model to solve challenges that traditional aid donors often overlook. By offering patient capital for core costs, LFS bolsters continuity, which is essential to philanthropic effectiveness. This allows local organizations to look beyond immediate needs, build on cross-border learning, systematize services, and turn pilot projects into policies. To ensure that gender equity, protection, and justice are at the core of economic policy, donors must realign their investments accordingly. This means ensuring that women’s rights organizations, which currently receive well under 1% of official development assistance (and only 0.4% of all gender-focused aid in recent years), obtain a significant share of the funding that is allocated for gender in the form of multiyear, flexible grants. Adequate funding and platforms like LFS, with their cross-border collaboration and grassroots infrastructure, can facilitate investment where it is needed most. For example, investment in Indigenous women’s leadership and economic autonomy is particularly important, given their critical role in safeguarding biodiversity and protecting land for future generations. To this end, donors should condition their headline pledges on allocating certain percentages to core funding, Global South-led groups, and programs focused on delivering care, safety, and access to support. Frameworks for measuring the impact of gender-responsive budgeting should feature indicators that can show improved outcomes for gender-based violence, such as survivors’ uptake of income support and enforcement of safe workplaces. Policymakers, for their part, must focus on institutionalizing gender-responsive budgeting. All ministries should adopt budget markers that show how spending advances gender equality; review the impact of government spending, with the results made public; and allocate a meaningful share of tax revenue, and public spending more broadly, toward closing the care gap and expanding women’s access to assets. That means expanding benefits for survivors of domestic violence – such as income assistance, childcare, and safe transport – and categorizing them as essential services. Lastly, they should collaborate with feminist organizations to co-design policy and track outcomes. The economic case for boosting investment in women’s rights organizations, and for ensuring that financing and budget decisions strengthen women’s safety and autonomy, has long been settled. According to the World Bank, every dollar spent on empowering adolescent girls in Africa could generate a tenfold return in terms of growth. Investing in women’s rights is not charity; it is a form of giving that generates outsize gains for all. Françoise Moudouthe, CEO of the African Women’s Development Fund, also contributed to this commentary.
