Time for a Better Bargain: How the Aid System Shortchanges Women and Girls in Crisis

Investing in women-led crisis response and prioritizing gender equality are key to effectively meeting humanitarian and recovery needs, tackling climate change, and achieving peace and prosperity.

This seems to be a simple concept and easy to champion. Yet despite this often-cited recognition, women’s priorities are still going unmet and their voices and expertise go unheeded.

And yes, total aid committed to support gender equality efforts has increased, but funding to front- line women’s organizations in fragile and conflict-affected areas remains at a paltry 0.2% of total bilateral aid. Now more than ever, funding and influence must flow into women-led crisis response, for effective, long-lasting, intergenerational impact. It’s time to get off the sidelines and be true champions.

We are hopeful our latest report raises eyebrows and jumpstarts action.

Time for a Better Bargain: How the Aid System Shortchanges Women and Girls in Crisis, reveals how UN agencies and wealthy nations have not adequately taken action to ensure women and girls are at the center of crisis response. It is our hope that this first-ever snapshot will prompt reflection and resolve to do better.

What it shows is that everyone can be doing better, including @CARE. Despite positive and often impressive multilateral, individual donor and UN agency initiatives, CARE’s analysis reveals that donor and UN agencies:  

• Fall short, with notable exceptions, of significantly funding women’s groups in fragile and conflict affected states
• Do not sufficiently fund gender equality or gender-sensitive programs
• Do not systematically track which partners are women’s rights or women-led organizations, making it difficult to assess effectiveness.

One notable success has been increased gender parity in UN operations, showing that, with adequate political will and resourcing, change is possible.

Even more troubling is that what modest successes we have achieved, as a global community, is at risk given the COVID-19 pandemic’s substantial economic and social toll. COVID and its secondary effects are threatening to wipe out decades of progress on gender equality efforts.

 That is why this report is timely and urgent. We must hold each other accountable, including ourselves, to ensure we aren’t losing even more ground. As part of the aid systems, we call on donors, UN agencies and fellow INGOs to:

• Adopt the seven gender-specific commitments in the CARE report card, or comparable gender-specific, time bound benchmarks, including into any revisions of the Grand Bargain, to facilitate ongoing accountability.
• Systematically track and report funding to and partnerships with women’s led and women’s rights organizations;
• Increase the amount and quality of humanitarian funding that goes to women-led and women- girls- or gender-focused organizations (including by reducing bureaucratic hurdles to accessing and administering funds, as well as providing core, flexible, multi-year funding)
• Actively champion and ensure that local women and women’s organizations are equitably represented and have an equal voice in humanitarian decision making structures.

In 2020, our CARE teams worked in over 100 countries reaching 92.3 million people of whom 73% of total reach are women and girls. But we recognize we must push to do more. 

For our part we are using this report as the foundation of our #SheLeadsInCrisis campaign. Over the coming year, CARE will work across existing and new networks to promote women’s voices, leadership, and participation by influencing national governments, targeted UN agencies and coordination mechanisms to fund and elevate women-led organizations.

Now more than ever, funding and influence must flow into women-led crisis response, for effective, long-lasting, intergenerational impact. It is not just the right thing to do; it is the best and most pragmatic way to advance human development and security around the world.