This week the Gender Financing Project launched the report “Making gender financing more transparent.” This blog reflects on the data needs of gender equality stakeholders and offers three key takeaways for international donors and data platforms to meet them.
It Is now well established that investing in women’s economic empowerment has a catalytic effect in reducing poverty for all people and achieving gender equality. In this blog, Sally Paxton discusses the urgent need for effective investment in women’s economic empowerment, and why limited understanding of who is funding what and with what results is hampering progress. To help efforts to overcome this barrier, we are launching a new project: “Women’s Economic Empowerment: building evidence for better investments”.
A lack of clear and consistent information on the funding and effectiveness of gender equality work makes it difficult to track progress on gender equality commitments in Guatemala, Kenya and Nepal. the Gender Financing Project has just published research mapping national and international funding flows in the three countries – and we found it remains difficult to paint a comprehensive picture of funding for gender equality, and to know if donors’ gender financing is making a difference. This blog is also available in Spanish, Nepali and K’iche’.
The US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) recently invited public comments on its draft transparency policy and draft policy on public engagement by the DFC Board of Directors. The draft policies are a step in the right direction, but additional actions can be taken to improve the transparency and accessibility of the DFC’s data. George Ingram and Sally Paxton highlight steps that could help the DFC reach its commitment to be the gold standard for transparency among development finance institutions.
Sally Paxton and George Ingram reflect on the performance of the five US donors in the 2020 Aid Transparency Index, and the next steps needed to improve their transparency and accountability. They also lay down the challenge of how we move towards the more important goals of doing development differently.
We are launching a new 2.5 year initiative to increase support for the transparency of Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). It follows a 12-month scoping exercise, and we’re now embarking on a focused, strategic programme to move things forward. Based on our initial research, and the previous work of academics, practitioners and policy-makers, we have set out a collaborative, evidence-based approach that we believe can inform and improve DFI transparency, accountability and decision-making.
