Is Canada's feminist foreign aid policy working?

MONTREAL — In June 2017, the Canadian government launched its Feminist International Assistance Policy, an ambitious document outlining the country’s vision for a gender- and human rights-based international assistance. The new policy calls for all aid projects to integrate gender equality and women’s empowerment, sets a target for investments in programs focusing on gender equality at 15% of bilateral development assistance by 2022, and outlines six action areas for programming. “This Liberal government has presented a very strong vision but has not matched it with resources.” --— Nicolas Moyer, president and CEO, Canadian Council for International Co-operation But Global Affairs Canada, the department in charge of leading international development efforts, is working with multiyear aid budgets that were set by the previous government. Without a substantial injection of new aid money, GAC has little financial leeway to put FIAP into practice. As a result, two years on, the government has made progress in articulating how it sees this vision unfold, but much less in bringing the policy to life through funded programs, Devex has learned. Canadian civil society organizations have been lobbying for more funds for years, as the country’s official development assistance only stands at 0.28% of its gross national income, far lower than the 0.7% U.N. aid target. The government did commit to a 2 billion Canadian dollar ($1.5 billion) increase of its ODA over five years in its 2018 budget, and an additional CA$100 million were pledged earlier this year. But all of that new money and more will serve to cover increasing in-country refugee and migrant costs, while Canada’s international assistance budget will keep on decreasing as a portion of total ODA, according to an analysis of Canadian International Development Platform figures. “This Liberal government has presented a very strong vision but has not matched it with resources. In fact, the previous Conservative government was more generous in relation to aid, and so our leadership role on the global stage, our ability to truly have an influence with our contributions to do more than simply state an interest … and to follow it up with funding, is limited,” said Nicolas Moyer, president and CEO at the Canadian Council for International Co-operation. Slow implementation Whatever funding has been disbursed to date indicates that GAC is facing internal obstacles in implementing the policy. A call for preliminary proposals for a new CA$100 million five-year pilot initiative targeting small and medium organizations and launched as part of FIAP, for example, generated a higher volume of applications than GAC had foreseen, leading to delays. Funding for the Women’s Voice and Leadership program, a CA$150 million initiative launched with FIAP, aims to channel funding directly to women’s rights organizations, which GAC is increasingly doing. “Through its Women’s Voice and Leadership Program, Global Affairs Canada is increasingly funding local partners directly, to support the work of women’s organizations and networks working to advance women’s rights and gender equality in developing countries,” said Sylvain Leclerc, a spokesperson for GAC. Yet this funding has been slow to disburse as well. As of May 2019, only 19 countries of the approximately 30 in the pipeline have been publicly announced as project funding recipients, according to Beth Woroniuk, policy lead at The Match International Women’s Fund. “Given that the program was announced two years ago, that’s very slow implementation,” Woroniuk said. The vast majority of Women’s Voice and Leadership Program awardees to date are actually Canadian CSOs, who will then redistribute the money to local groups. “We're still not seeing women's rights organizations receiving funding to the extent that we'd like to see or a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights in the recipient organizations,” said Sarah Kenell, director of government relations at Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights. Risk-averse bureaucracy Representatives of Canadian CSOs told Devex that any hurdle that GAC is facing in implementing the policy is bureaucratic in nature since the government has demonstrated its full commitment to creating and launching FIAP. The bottleneck stems from GAC’s internal processes, which need to be adapted to the new types of partnerships and funding mechanisms the policy aims to support, they explained. “[GAC’s results-based management framework] is quite prohibitive to particularly small, grassroots organizations that do advocacy work, like women's rights organizations in particular, and responding to their needs from an administrative perspective can be very challenging,” Kenell said. “The gender equality partnership in the works would hopefully alleviate some of those concerns,” she added, referring to the upcoming initiative gathering partners from the philanthropic, private, nonprofit, and governmental sectors to catalyze new investments in support of gender equality and women’s rights in low- and middle-income countries. Delays also seem to be affecting GAC’s ability to release official implementation guidelines for FIAP. Of the six policy guidance documents GAC intended to release for each of its core areas, only one has been released to date, detailing Canada’s gender-responsive approach to humanitarian assistance. GAC has nonetheless made progress on other fronts, releasing a Gender Equality Toolkit for Projects providing guidance on FIAP-consistent aid programming, and introducing its Key Performance Indicators to monitor progress in the six areas of FIAP. “The FIAP commits to improving evidence-based decision-making by investing in better data collection and evaluation for gender equality. This can be achieved in part by developing stronger and more meaningful performance indicators to track the performance of Canada’s international assistance programming,” said Leclerc. The indicators will also track progress toward gender equality at the global level, and within GAC itself, he added. Renewed dialogue Considering those hurdles, FIAP has nevertheless made its mark on Canadian foreign aid thus far by creating space for discussion that didn't exist before. NGO representatives report a significant shift in their relationship with GAC and the ministry responsible for international development, ever since the government embarked on the consultation process that eventually led to FIAP. “The policy has made a huge difference in the kinds of scope for discussion, the kind of conversations we do have at Global Affairs. There’s been a different openness to consultation, and a really good exchange of ideas,” Woroniuk said. “People are now asking questions like, ‘How do we evaluate impact?,’ or ‘How do we do this better?,’ or ‘What do we need to do differently to reach women's rights organizations?’ That whole question of the ‘how’ is now part of the discussion, because we no longer have to spend the first three quarters of a meeting making the case that … we should be working on gender equality, and the rights of women and girls and trans people.” This shift has translated into some tangible decisions on the part of GAC. Last February, it pledged CA$30 million in support of global LGBTQ rights over five years — a significant increase compared to the $1.6 million spent by Canada and reported by the Global Philanthropy Project for 2015-2016 — forging relationships with new partners such as the Dignity Network, a group of organizations across Canada involved in supporting the human rights of LGBTQ people globally. “The simple fact that we’re engaging with Global Affairs is what changed, that we can talk to Global Affairs about these intersectional issues,” said Doug Kerr, executive chair at the Dignity Network. High expectations for health and rights CSOs hope the government’s commitment to its feminist aid policy will materialize once more as the funding for its maternal, newborn, and child health initiative is up for renewal in 2020. A coalition of global health organizations has developed the Thrive Agenda, a comprehensive approach that places women and girls at the heart of a whole spectrum of health and rights interventions they may access throughout their lives. Thrive calls on the government to commit to CA$1.4 billion in funding over the next decade for women, adolescents, and children’s health and rights, of which CA$500 million would go to neglected areas of sexual and reproductive health and rights including sexuality education for adolescents, contraceptive care, and safe abortion care. “This the first time the sector has come together to develop a comprehensive agenda that we’re asking the Canadian government to implement,” said Julia Anderson, acting executive director and senior director of programs and operations at the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health, adding she hoped the government would announce its commitment to Thrive at the Women Deliver conference, which will be held in early June in Vancouver. “It’s doubling down in a moment where the rest of the world is pulling back.”