Gender equality is gaining prominence across development projects, but following the money behind efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 5 is challenging.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s gender equality marker — a tagging tool used by donors to categorize gender equality-related development activities — has shown a slow increase over the past decade or so. Nonetheless, in 2018, only 8% of official development assistance targeted gender equality as the core purpose of the assistance. The vast majority of gender-tagged projects included gender equality components but it wasn’t the principal goal. Additionally, not all donors screen projects against this marker, which adds to the complexity of assessing spending in this area.
Oxfam published a report last year that questioned the effectiveness of this methodology, given the gap found between the donor’s self-reported funding figures and the quality of the gender projects. New research is underway to improve the publication of gender financing and programmatic data.