All Foreign Policy Spending Should Take Gender Into Account
This brief originally appeared on the International Center for Research on Women's website.
Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
This brief originally appeared on the International Center for Research on Women's website.
The Biden administration has a unique window to capitalize on pro-transparency sentiment at home, and the reform momentum abroad, to implement a series of much-needed updates to the US domestic financial transparency apparatus.
The Biden administration can restore the US government’s reputation as a global leader on gender equality—and take it to the next level through employing an intersectional lens.
As the world’s largest bilateral donor responsible for managing around $20 billion in annual funding, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has a particular responsibility to take an evidence-informed approach to its work. It also has a congressional mandate to do so.
As much as current US policy has sought to characterize China’s lending program in blunt and strictly negative terms, the reality is mixed.
Implement quick wins to re-establish US credibility and engagement in global health
Swift and orderly action on international debt is a moral, political, economic, and security imperative for the United States. A series of disorderly and protracted debt crises would be catastrophic for the world’s poorest countries. A Biden administration can raise the G20’s ambition level to avert a global debt crisis and strive to forge a consensus around a COVID-19 debt framework.
Promote mutually beneficial Northern Triangle migration through two phases of action.
In the short term, improve access to H-2 visa programs under current law by connecting US employers to employees in the region. To do so:
By surveying DFIs, we aim to start building a baseline of their gender policies and practices, analyze the data, and make recommendations where stronger policies and practices are needed. The survey’s findings give DFIs an important opportunity to learn from one another and work towards standards for how they can best promote gender equity.
Lee Robinson, Euan Ritchie, and Charles Kenny explore how the UK can heighten its R&D official development assistance spend.
The Commitment to Development Index ranks 40 countries on their development policies. How did your country do this year?
The novel coronavirus outbreak that emerged in late 2019 has infected tens of thousands in China, community transmission is feared in other countries, and containment looks increasingly unlikely.
Management by way of top-down controls and targets sometimes gets in the way of aid donors’ aims, undermining project success. These unhelpful controls often stem from a need to account for performance; legislatures or executive boards induce agencies to exercise tight process controls and orient projects towards what is measurable and reportable.
The time to act is now. There is a finite window of opportunity to embed medium-term approaches before international attention wanes further and donor fatigue results in even greater funding shortfalls.
Bangladesh is hosting more than a million Rohingya refugees, and businesses have a critical role to play in improving the situation for them and their Bangladeshi host communities. We have identified four viable areas for business investment and procurement in Cox’s Bazar, the historically under-developed region that is hosting the Rohingya refugees.
When the world adopted the SDGs, policymakers knew that aid alone would never meet the financing needs. They embraced the “billions to trillions” vision, believing that an abundance of commercially viable SDG-related investments was ready and waiting for trillions in profitable private investment—if only development finance institutions (DFIs) and others could clear away the obstacles that stand between the investments and private investors. Reality looks different. To fill the gaps in the financial architecture, Nancy Lee and Dan Preston propose the Stretch Fund.
The arrival of a new leadership team in Brussels provides an opportunity for Europe to reinvigorate its role as a global development power and to build a true partnership with its continental neighbour, Africa. These tasks have never been more urgent. Read here for recommendations on migration.
Global development is increasingly intertwined with state fragility. Poverty is becoming concentrated in fragile states, and conflict, violent extremism, and environmental stresses can emerge from and be exacerbated by fragility. As a result, many donors, including the United States, are reflecting on lessons of the past to rethink how they can better help fragile states address the underlying causes of fragility, build peace and stability, and cope with complex risks.
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