Devex CheckUp: The Latin American feminist taking on the anti-rights movement

Earlier this week, I spoke with Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, the newly appointed director-general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, who is taking over the organization during a period of distress for sexual and reproductive rights advocates.

I’m talking about official development assistance cuts, what Maria referred to as the “global gag rule on steroids,” and secretive United States deals that critics say trample the sovereignty of many African countries.

The organization estimates that member associations and partners lost $87.2 million for work extending to 2029 due to U.S. canceled contracts, which translates to about 1,400 shuttered clinics. And several of its donors, including the United Kingdom, are shrinking or reshaping their aid budgets to beef up their security defenses.

Maria is keenly aware of these realities and said the organization has drawn on its reserves to build a Fightback Fund. But for someone who has spent decades fighting for women’s rights, she appeared undeterred by these challenges. Rather, she believes she’s coming in at the right time to lead the organization, and is quite surprised to know she’s the first chief to come from Latin America, given the strong sexual and reproductive health and rights movement in the region.

“I always say that I’m extremely privileged to get paid for something that I would do for free,” she told me.

She will make her first official trip as IPPF chief in a few weeks. Her first stop? Morocco and Mauritania. The initial plan was to visit Lebanon to see the work of its member association there and show support. But she had to change plans due to the security situation amid Israel’s attacks on the country.

Read: New International Planned Parenthood chief steps in amid anti-rights surge

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History says …

There’s one other thing you need to know about Maria: She was part of the movement that led to the creation of UN Women — which was born out of a merger of four United Nations entities — the Division for the Advancement of Women, the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, and the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

However, she’s not so keen on the U.N. proposal to merge UN Women and UNFPA.

“Merging is not a bad thing by itself, if you merge to be bolder and more efficient and to be able to reach more people. We’re all for it. And so we are not just saying no to this merging for the sake of the merger,” she told me. But she said it needs to preserve UNFPA’s sexual and reproductive rights work.

That’s a key concern not just for Maria, but for the many individuals and organizations working in the sector, who are baffled by the proposal. They say the two entities have distinct mandates and are not as resource-intensive as other U.N. agencies, if funding were THE primary factor behind the merger proposal.

Proposals to merge the United Nations Population Fund with UN Women are not new. However, the conclusion has always been that UNFPA is better off on its own.

Here’s what I found: A 2006 paper proposing the creation of UN Women specifically mentions this, arguing that while UNFPA “is frequently tagged on as part of the UN’s ‘women’s machinery.’ This stand-alone agency has a distinct mandate (which applies to both women and men) and does not appear to overlap with others.” It adds that “UNFPA functions well as an independent entity, though with too few resources, and should work closely and collaboratively with a women’s agency while maintaining its separate status.”

Seventeen years later, in 2023, Dalberg conducted an independent review of the U.N. system’s capacity to deliver on gender equality. Again, the idea of a merger between the two came up. But the review concluded that the “disadvantages of the merger outweigh its advantages.”

This raises an important question: If previous evaluations have already determined that UNFPA and UN Women are better off apart, why does U.N. HQ seem so keen on bundling them? 

The U.N. is doing yet another assessment, which will hopefully answer this question.

Trying to make sense of it all, an official from one of the two agencies  — who describes the process over the past few months as confusing and frustrating — tells me: “It really came to seem like the entirety of UN80 reform was either just a pretext to merge these two agencies, or they just felt that these two agencies were the weakest.”

The proposal also comes on the heels of a wide-ranging restructuring at UNFPA that moved a significant number of its staff from New York to Nairobi, which meant staff had to uproot their families. And now, a merger, if it happens, could once again disrupt the organization — and lead to further job losses.

Member states have been asking the U.N. secretary-general to produce an analysis showing the benefits and risks of a merger. So far, his office has only come up with a baseline analysis, which provides a snapshot of each organization’s governance, donor funding, budget and reach, as well as each of their strengths and weaknesses.

ICYMI: Document lays groundwork for UN Women–UNFPA merger

Opinion: Merging UNFPA and UN Women would undermine gender equality globally 

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Dear US Congress

This seems like a good time to also get clarity on some of the big questions around U.S. support for family planning.

The White House has been very clear on where it stands on funding for the sector — zero, according to Trump’s budget request for 2026. But Congress defied that by passing a bill that included more than $607.5 million for family planning and reproductive health care.

But it’s unclear where that funding will go. The U.S. has pulled out of UNFPA, and there’s no mention of family planning or reproductive health care in the “America First” Global Health Strategy. These priorities are also absent from U.S. bilateral health deals. The White House also has a history of clawing back funding already approved by Congress.

Will Congress force the Trump administration to spend that money? No one knows. As Beth Schlachter, senior director of external relations and advocacy for MSI Reproductive Choices, tells my colleague Elissa Miolene: “Until Congress grows a backbone, it’s very unlikely [the State Department is] going to do anything with it — and they don’t have the staff to do it anyway.”

Read: US pulls away from family planning. What about the $600M saved for it?

Forget the icing — it's all about the egg

I’m going a little bit off tangent here, but I was sitting in an Asian Development Bank-hosted panel session on Tuesday, trying to stay awake, when British economist Lawrence Haddad, who’s also the executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, started talking about cake.

No, he wasn't advocating for people to eat cake (although, coincidentally, there was cake served during the ADB dinner that night). He was making a bigger point: Nutrition is still treated like an afterthought in food security conversations — even though, by definition, food security is supposed to be about nutritious food.

“Many of you have made a cake. You know that without eggs, there is no cake. Nutrition is the egg that makes the cake. It keeps the cake together. It gives it structure. It gives it a form. Without the egg, you just have crumbs. So nutrition is absolutely baked into the cake. It's not the icing,” he said.

But it seems not everyone understands this.

“You won't believe how many people I have to — who should know better — explain the difference between hunger and malnutrition,” he said.

What we’re reading

According to a new report by the Access to Medicines Foundation, there is a shrinking pipeline for both adult and pediatric antimicrobial products. [Devex]

A draft memo shows the State Department is considering withholding lifesaving assistance for people living with HIV in Zambia to force the country to sign a deal that would give the U.S. government access to its minerals. [The New York Times]

Officials were able to curb the cholera outbreak in Kenya’s Tana River County after they addressed the human, animal, and environmental health needs in the area, but replicating that approach in future outbreaks will require additional resources. [Devex]