International Development Select Committee inquiry

Humanitarian crises monitoring: impact of coronavirus

Submission to the International Development Committee inquiry

Humanitarian crises monitoring: impact of coronavirus

Evidence submitted by ActionAid UK

11 May 2020

Summary: a gendered crisis

As a result of existing discriminatory social norms, women and girls already experience multiple disadvantages, amounting to violations of their rights. Evidence from COVID-19 and other public health crises shows that during these emergencies, women and girls face distinct and disproportionate impacts, whilst existing gender inequalities are deepened. Specifically, women and girls in the Global South:

• are more likely to already be living in poverty and, therefore, lack access to basic supplies and services such as soap and handwashing facilities and often live and work in cramped conditions where social distancing is impossible;
• are more likely to be exposed to the virus and its impacts as they comprise the majority of care providers and healthcare workers globally;
• undertake the vast majority of unpaid care and domestic work, a burden that increases dramatically in times of crisis when public services are inadequate, inaccessible or too costly;
• are over-represented in the informal sector and in precarious forms of work, including in global supply chains;
• face increased exposure to gender-based violence as result of COVID-19 including at the hands of police and security forces as well as intimate partner violence during lockdown;
• are less able to access critical life-saving services; and
• are likely to be excluded from crucial decision-making spaces that affect their lives.

Women and girls who have been displaced or are living in conflict affected states or occupied territories are particularly vulnerable to these impacts.

Many of the direct risks to women and girls are outlined in ActionAid UK’s first submission to the International Development Select Committee inquiry on the immediate impacts of COVID-19. Beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis, there is a huge risk to communities in the Global South as the world transitions to a ‘new normal’. COVID-19 is likely to have long term economic, political and social impacts – threatening the resilience of communities and risking progress made on development and gender equality. This second ActionAid UK submission focuses on the longer-term human rights impacts on women and girls, including with respect to their livelihoods, physical integrity, and access to decent work.

Summary of recommendations

1. The direct and indirect impacts of the outbreak on developing countries, and specific risks and threats

Women’s leadership, localisation and long-term change

We urge the UK Government to:

• Ensure that the COVID-19 response and recovery strategy are informed by gender analysis, building on sex and age disaggregated data (SADD)[1] and gendered analyses of COVID-19's social and economic impacts on the most marginalised women and girls, along with consultations with local women and women’s rights organisations.
• Channel ODA funds to women’s rights organisations (WROs). This funding must be flexible, core and adaptable to the ever-changing and difficult context and must be focused on the poorest and most vulnerable rights-holders. To ensure local organisations have the capacity to accept and implement funds, the UK Government must adapt its compliance and due diligence processes.
• Strengthen the participation and leadership of WROs in COVID-19 decision-making spaces and processes. This means including local women and women’s rights organisations in programme design and at a cluster level. National governments and UN coordination leads should encourage the support and leadership of local women in COVID-19 cluster contingency planning, ensuring their meaningful engagement in all clusters and coordination mechanisms.
• Ensure that all UK funding prioritises the rights of women and girls and supports women’s leadership and participation. Given that large sums of UK spending are currently being channelled through multilateral organisations - including through UN agencies - it is vital that DFID requires this funding to be spent in a way that promotes gender equality.

The right to decent work: women in informal sectors and global value chains

We urge the UK Government to:

• Undertake gendered human rights impact assessments of trade deals, with time and space built into the process to ensure the deal can be amended.
• Meaningfully consult women’s rights organisations, particularly those representing the most marginalised groups, as part of trade negotiations (especially with countries in the Global South) to understand how trade may affect different groups of women.
• Ensure that all businesses in the UK undertaking transnational activities, carry out mandatory gender-responsive human rights due diligence and can be held legally accountable for rights violations in their supply chains. The UK should also support a binding UN treaty on business and human rights.
• Use its political and economic leverage in multilateral fora to incentivise policies in countries in the Global South that will improve economic opportunities for women.
• Ratify ILO Convention 190 on Violence and Harassment in the world of work and encourage other governments to follow suit.
• Support an economic stimulus that promotes a sustainable and climate resilient economic recovery.

Unpaid care and gender-responsive public services

We urge the UK Government to:

• Cancel debt payments to be made in 2020 and provide emergency additional finance that does not create debt. All principal, interest and charges on sovereign external debt due in 2020 should be cancelled permanently, they should not accrue into the future.
• Use its place on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Board to advocate for an end to loan conditionalities and policy advice that promote austerity and funding cuts to vital public services and social protection, and instead focus on protecting fiscal space for states to build up and sustain robust public health and wider public services systems.
• As part of its post-COVID-19 recovery strategy, commit to, resource, and implement trade and investment policies that do not restrict women’s access to publicly financed gender-responsive public services in childcare, education, health, and water and sanitation.

2. The impact of the outbreak on UK aid funding in the longer term

We urge the UK Government to:

• Through the development of the new aid strategy and forthcoming Integrated Review, ensure UK ODA remains focused primarily on poverty alleviation and gender equality above any commercial, foreign policy or security interests, in line with the 2002 International Development Act, 2014 Gender Equality Act and OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) rules.
• Maintain and increase the current proportion of ODA spent on gender equality, preventing violence against women and girls and on women and girls’ rights policy and programming.
• Ensure UK ODA, wherever it is spent, is fully transparent and accountable to the UK taxpayer, meeting targets set out in the 2015 Aid Strategy, and through the maintenance of key scrutiny bodies and international standards including the International Development Committee, Independent Commission for Aid Impact and the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

1. The direct and indirect impacts of the outbreak on developing countries, and specific risks and threats

Women’s leadership and ongoing exclusion from key decision-making spaces

1.1         ActionAid’s approach to emergencies – its humanitarian signature – has four key components: shifting power to local actors;  recognising the agency and leadership of local women and their collective action; ensuring accountability to those affected by emergencies and ensuring our short-term response links to resilience-building and longer-term sustainable change. ActionAid has been driving this approach for more than a decade and our experience, underpinned by evidence, has shown the effectiveness of investing in local, women-led responses[2].

1.2         Almost four years on from the World Humanitarian Summit, ambitious plans to reform the humanitarian sector are still failing to shift power and resources to local actors within preparedness, response, recovery, and long-term resilience efforts. Grand Bargain Signatories, including governments, donors, international NGOs (INGOs) and United Nations (UN) agencies, continue to work in ways which create financial, regulatory, and cultural barriers to local women-led organisations[3]. The absence of women was noted during the Ebola epidemic, and women continue to be markedly absent from crucial decision-making spaces in relation to COVID-19[4],[5]. The UN Global Humanitarian Plan for COVID-19 is a good reflection of the current state of play; the Plan makes the case for ‘localisation’ but does not mention women’s agency and will channel 95 per cent of its funds through UN agencies. COVID-19 is a crucial opportunity for the UN, and Grand Bargain Signatories – including the UK – to prioritise women’s leadership and uphold women’s rights – as articulated by UN Women[6].

1.3         While women are exposed to multiple risks in emergency settings, they are also often the first to respond. Women-led actors bring invaluable knowledge of their local context and are well-positioned to identify and drive effective responses; leveraging existing networks and connections to mobilise quickly and effectively. In previous health crises[7], local women have been a powerful force in infectious disease control. They know the best ways of communicating health messages to, and are trusted by, families and communities; increasing adoption of healthy behaviours based on accessible information - powerful assets in tackling COVID-19. Women-led responses are also able to ensure that the needs of women and girls are met at their roots and are therefore invaluable in building longer-term sustainable change and resilience. This is particularly noted in relation to responding to and preventing violence against women and girls[8].

1.4         For example, following women-led responses to Cyclone Mahasen in 2013 in Bangladesh, ActionAid research highlighted perceived shifts in gender norms, noting that women were subsequently encouraged and supported to participate in community decision-making, and that some men undertook domestic tasks while women were participating in activities outside of the home. Women reported a positive shift in how their opinions were valued and considered that to be a significant change in their community. Similarly, in the Philippines, women found that their participation in the women-led response initiatives to Typhoon Haiyan made their leadership more valued and visible to the community. As a result, they reported playing a more visible role in family-level decision-making[9].

1.5         To realise this transformative potential, local responders, international agencies, and donors need to demonstrate commitment to promoting women’s leadership and protecting women’s rights. This means ensuring that women have a meaningful voice in decisions on funding, operations, capacity strengthening efforts and measuring.

Recommendations to the UK Government

1.6         COVID-19 poses a real risk that progress made on eradicating poverty and gender equality could be lost and meeting the Sustainable Development Goals will be unlikely. Governments must work collaboratively to do things differently, including scaling up investment in local, women-led organisations, which have proven to be an effective approach to building resilient communities.

1.7         As part of the ‘Grand Bargain’, the UK made a commitment to better support local and national responders to become central actors within the humanitarian system. COVID-19 is an opportunity to support the vital work of local actors, whose frontline knowledge and experience will ensure gender equality is a central feature of recovery efforts. To that end, we urge the Government to:

• Conduct gender consultation and analysis: To understand the gendered impacts of COVID-19, the government must build on sex, age disaggregated data (SADD) along with analysis of gendered social and economic impacts, conduct rapid gender assessments[10], and undertake ongoing research including with local women and women’s rights organisations. This should be documented. This will support both the immediate response efforts but also support effective and holistic long-term programming and policy that support gender transformative outcomes for women and girls across the humanitarian and development continuum.

• Channel funds to women’s rights organisations (WROs): A proportion of funding from the UK’s COVID-19 response must be channelled through local WROs, including those representing and/or working with the most marginalised women and girls. This funding must be able to support core costs, as well as flexible and adaptable to the ever-changing and difficult contexts in which WROs work. For local organisations to accept and implement funds, the UK Government must adapt its compliance and due diligence processes. WROs should be supported through:

-          Dedicated funding for COVID-19.  This funding should include specific and mandatory targets for DFID to ensure that resource reaches women and girls, ensures gender responsive approaches, and supports the pursuit of gender equality outcomes and women-led approaches - including for (violence against women and girls) VAWG prevention and response.

-          The piloting of new, flexible funding models led by WROs. It is essential that there are funding mechanisms to support the collective leadership and action of women in longer-term strategic recovery and resilience work, as part of their ongoing gender-justice work. Direct funding models must be led by women, provide long-term, predictable finance and include core funding to support local women-led organisations ‘to deliver their self-defined priorities’, as they adapt their work to deal with the gendered impact of COVID-19[11].

-          Channeling funds through ‘localisation-friendly’ funding models. Often these can promote existing local and women-led responses more easily than funds channelled through UN and INGO intermediaries.

• Support women’s leadership: DFID should also work to strengthen the participation and leadership of WROs in COVID-19 decision-making spaces/processes. This includes:

-          Strengthening representation and power of local women and women-led actors in programme design. Meaningfully engaging with local women-led actors and being accountable to them, involves providing accessible information. It is also critical to create spaces and opportunities for them to inform the design of programming responses, which value and are guided by local knowledge and women’s priorities.  

-          Strengthening the representation and power of local women and women-led actors at a cluster level. National governments and UN coordination leads should encourage the input and leadership of women, and local women-led actors in COVID-19 cluster contingency planning, ensuring their meaningful engagement in all clusters and coordination mechanisms. What this means is taking advice on how to remove barriers to women’s meaningful engagement, including travel and security restrictions, financial constraints, and addressing language issues

• Ensure that all UK funding prioritises the rights of women and girls and supports women’s leadership and participation: Given that large sums of UK spending is currently being channelled through multilateral organisations - including through UN agencies - it is vital that DFID requires this funding to be spent in a way that promotes gender equality.

The right to decent work: women in informal sectors and global value chains

1.8         COVID-19 is expected to drive long-term economic impacts, exacerbating inequalities based on gender and other systems of discrimination. UNCTAD has predicted the cost to the global economy will be US$1trillion and predicts a 2 per cent slow-down in the global economy[12].  The World Bank reports that 50 million additional people are expected to fall into poverty as a result of COVID-19, with the majority in Sub-Saharan Africa, and agriculture in Africa is expected to decline by 3-7 per cent[13].  

1.9         Many countries in the Global South have vast informal sectors which will be deeply affected by the crisis; the ILO warns that 1.6 billion workers in the informal economy – that is nearly half of the global workforce – stand in immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed[14]. Informal employment as a percentage of total employment in Sub Saharan Africa is 89 per cent, in South Asia is 88 per cent, in East and Southeast Asia (excluding China) is 77 per cent, and in Latin America and the Caribbean is 54 per cent[15].

1.10     Women are overrepresented in these sectors; holding the majority of the lowest paid, most insecure, informal and vulnerable jobs[16]. These jobs often lack any form of social protection and have limited opportunities to unionise, falling far short of the standards of decent work as defined by the ILO. COVID-19 exacerbates this trend, with women workers finding it more difficult to work due to childcare responsibilities as schools and childcare centres are closed. Women garment makers and bead sellers in South Africa can no longer produce or sell their goods as these markets are closed, while in Mexico, female waste pickers are reportedly bringing their children to work since there are no classes: “they put them on their carts, because they have to work”, said one interviewee to WIEGO[17]. ActionAid Tanzania reports that school closures have increased unpaid care work for women, because all children are at home and their care is considered as a woman’s responsibility.

1.11     Of course, school closures as a result of COVID-19 is likely to have long-term consequences for those children removed from school. As the global economic slow-down takes hold and domestic burdens increase, some children - particularly girls - may never return to school. During the EVD outbreak in West Africa, increased care burdens led to increased absenteeism for girls, with long-term detrimental impacts on their educational, health and economic outcomes[18].

1.12     In order to ensure a gender-responsive approach to COVID-19, it is therefore vital that the UK Government considers the informal sector (and women’s over-representation within this sector) as they plan ahead for economic recovery. DFID should conduct a gender-responsive analysis of the needs in the communities in which they are operating, including the prevalence of informal work, the fiscal policy space of the respective Government to enact social protection measures or bolster public services, and the existence of social protection measures, so that UK response addresses the diversified needs of a country’s whole population. Although the aim should be for governments to fund their own, universal social protection systems, initial, evidence-based support from DFID can help to kickstart the process towards self-sufficiency. It is essential that the extensions to schemes are not just a stop-gap solution but integrated into governments’ long-term strategies.

1.13     The slowdown in consumption is also having a disproportionate impact on women working in garments and textiles – including as homeworkers, and in agricultural processing as part of global value chains. The expansion of global value chains, facilitated through trade and investment deals, has generated millions of much-needed jobs for women, who comprise some 80-90 per cent of the workforce producing clothes for major brands[19]. However, as price remains one of the main criteria for global brands, competition between suppliers to produce cheap goods in many countries in the Global South has led to downward pressure on women’s wages and working conditions, leading to their increasing informalisation.

1.14     This pressure can increase further during times of crisis, as it did during the 2008 global economic crash, for example, when suppliers in countries such as Bangladesh came under pressure to produce garments and shoes even more quickly and cheaply, translating into even worse pay and conditions for workers. In 2009, Marks & Spencer’s, Tesco and H&M were reportedly among 50 brands and retailers calling on Bangladesh exporters to reduce their prices if they wished to stay competitive[20]. Young domestic migrant women are rendered even more powerless in relation to employers. These workers, integral to the global economy and their countries’ respective economic recoveries, face the risk of increased poverty wages, persistently dangerous and unsafe working conditions and further eroded levels of social protection[21].

1.15     As well as facing a long-term reduction in wages in a decline in working conditions, women also face the imminent threat of becoming destitute overnight. Due to a fall in consumer demand from COVID-19-related lockdowns and a shortage of raw materials from China, many factories in garment-producing countries are closing down. In Myanmar, more than 60,000 factory workers have already lost their jobs since the start of the crisis[22]. As of April 2020, more than a million garment workers in Bangladesh alone have been sent home without pay or social protection after major clothing brands cancelled or suspended $3.17bn of orders due to the collapse in consumer demand caused by COVID-19[23],[24]. Meanwhile in Cambodia, hundreds of garment factories with an approximate 500,000 workers are at risk of closure or suspension because of cancellation of orders or failure by buyers to honour their contracts[25].

1.16     An increase in poverty and destitution leads to a higher risk of exploitation in many forms. Economic exploitation, with poor working conditions, will make women more vulnerable to violence and sexual abuse[26]. While violence against women and girls affects women from all economic situations, ActionAid’s research shows that women in vulnerable work are more likely to experience intimate partner violence. Therefore, women already in informal jobs facing income loss and job insecurity due to the pandemic may also face an increased risk of violence and abuse.

1.17     The pandemic has  shone a renewed light on the deficit in decent work faced by millions of women producing clothes and products for consumption in UK markets, the lack of corporate accountability in this regard, and the unsustainability of developing countries’ high reliance on FDI-supported, export-orientated models of low value-added growth.

1.18     The economic fallout of COVID-19 comprises a critical moment for leaders in the Global North – including the UK as it prepares to re-enter post-Brexit trade negotiations – to consider the implications of its trade and investment policies as well as its wider approaches to promoting decent work for women, including social protection for informal sector workers and the fostering of sustainable green jobs, and strengthening corporate accountability. A gender-responsive approach to international trade should be adopted, with steps taken to end the race-to-the-bottom of wages and working conditions in global value chains and improvements in social protection[27]. Multinationals should be held accountable for rights violations in their supply chains, including through mandatory gender-responsive human rights due diligence legislation and a binding UN treaty on business and human rights[28].

1.19     The UK Government has long been a champion of women’s economic empowerment; it is a pillar of DFID’s Global Vision for Gender Equality and cuts across DFID’s Economic Development Strategy. The UK is among the 118 countries which have signed up to the World Trade Organization’s Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment, launched in 2017. The Declaration includes commitments on sharing best practices for conducting gender-based analysis of trade policies. Similarly, the flagship SheTrades initiative, supported by the UK and numerous donors, aims to connect three million women entrepreneurs to global markets.

1.20     However, these commitments are predominantly concerned with removing the barriers women face to engaging in trade, notably by supporting women entrepreneurs, whilst ignoring the impacts of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on women as workers, producers, consumers, small-scale farmers, and as principal providers of unpaid care. The COVID-19 crisis means that it is more critical than ever for leaders to move beyond the focus on women’s entrepreneurship – which targets a relatively narrow proportion of women in the Global South – and urgently address the broader impacts of current trade rules and deals on the rights of women as workers, producers, consumers, and providers of unpaid care work, especially those from the poorest and most marginalised communities. As we move beyond the COVID-19 crisis, ActionAid therefore urges the UK Government to take a renewed focus on decent work for formal and informal workers. It should also systematically evaluate how its economic policies and development programmes and approaches, and job creation programme, and recognise the economic barriers that prevent women realising their rights. Women must be paid living wages, equal to men’s, and enjoy social protections such as paid maternity leave.

1.21     As COVID-19 causes economic devastation in the Global South, women and girls in these nations are already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. Ahead of the St Petersburg Climate Dialogue, the UK Government spoke of the need for a ‘green and resilient’ post-COVID recovery. This is to be welcomed. Government spend must support the transition to a zero-carbon world rather than a return to ‘business as usual’. To that end, we call on the Government to support economic recovery through green stimulus so that developing countries have the chance to recover and build resilience from both the COVID-19 and climate crises that threaten their development and sustainability. Ensuring the meaningful participation of women and girls in economic recovery plans in response to COVID-19, will also support the long-term transition to a more equitable, gender just and climate just world.

1.22     Recommendations to UK Government:

• The UK Government should undertake gendered human rights impact assessments of trade deals, taking account of short and long-term Covid-related impacts, with time and space built into the process to ensure the deal can be amended.
• Women’s rights organisations, particularly those representing the most marginalised groups from partner countries in the Global South, should be meaningfully consulted as part of trade negotiations to understand how trade may affect different groups of women in different parts of the economy.
• The UK Government should ensure that all businesses in the UK undertaking transnational activities carry out mandatory gender-responsive human rights due diligence and can be held legally accountable for rights violations in their supply chains. The UK should also support a binding UN treaty on business and human rights.
• The UK Government should scale up financing and resources to support access to universal gender-responsive social protection for women working in the informal sector.
• The UK should use its political and economic leverage in multilateral fora to incentivise policies in countries in the Global South that will improve economic opportunities for women.
• The UK should Ratify ILO Convention 190 on Violence and Harassment in the world of work and encourage other governments to follow suit.
• The UK Government should support an economic stimulus that promotes a sustainable and climate resilient economic recovery.

Unpaid care and gender-responsive public services

1.23     For decades, austerity policies advocated by institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank has meant that public services in the global south have been chronically underfunded, leaving many countries completely unprepared for COVID-19. The World Health Organisation recommends that governments spend $86 per person per year on health services. Yet Uganda spends just $6 and Malawi spends just $8[29].

1.24     Beyond the donor conditionalities and policy advice itself, which is hugely influential in driving public sector spending cuts, a key factor affecting government revenue and spending is debt. The COVID crisis has hit at a time when countries are already struggling with the burden of debt and spending increasing shares of their Government revenue on debt repayments[30]. Cancelling debt payments is the fastest way to keep money in countries and free up resources to tackle the urgent and long-term health, social and economic impacts of COVID-19. Recent analysis from ActionAid International and Jubilee Debt Campaign estimated how much extra finance countries would have had in 2019 if their debt servicing was reduced to the acceptable threshold of 12 per cent of government revenues. Analysis showed that Bangladesh and Ghana, for example, would each have had over $5 billion to invest in public services every year and Kenya would have had over $4 billion a year in extra revenue. These sums would be transformative if invested in public services[31].

1.25     In understanding what a truly gender-responsive approach to COVID-19 means – an approach that the Secretary of State has committed to take[32] – DFID must consider how the crisis can affect women with respect to their multiple roles in society, whether as workers, small-scale farmers, consumers, and – vitally – as the main givers of unpaid care and domestic work for households and communities. Women undertake over 76 per cent of all unpaid care work globally – with the burden greatest in contexts of poverty, where public services are lacking or inadequate[33]. This constrains the time that women have to secure work, engage in education, training, or community decision-making. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated that, continuing present trends, it will take 209 years to close the gender gap in time spent on unpaid care work[34]. COVID-19 exacerbates this burden, with healthcare and other public services under even further strain.

1.26     Care for sick and elderly family members is a major part of the unpaid care and domestic work that tends to be borne by women. As family members fall ill, women are more likely to provide care, as recorded during an Ebola outbreak in Liberia[35], and with AIDS patients in Uganda[36], putting themselves at higher risk of exposure as well as sacrificing time that could be spend in education or paid work. Indeed, the Lancet estimates that women’s contribution to healthcare constitutes nearly five per cent of global GDP – or $3 trillion to global health – but nearly half is unpaid and unrecognised[37]. The difficulties of accessing health services that are often distant from home, with long queues and waiting lists and with prohibitive costs, exacerbates the burden.

1.27     The unpaid care work burden also leads to women’s increased exposure to sexual exploitation and violence. With sparser resources and more difficulty accessing water, food, firewood and medicines, women and girls will have to travel long distances and be at greater risk of harassment and violence[38]. When resources become scarce, due to supply chain disruption or income instability, violence such as intimate partner violence, early and forced child marriage and female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) increase also[39]. This will have ongoing repercussions as child marriage leaves girls vulnerable to rape and abuse for the rest of their lives, reduces girls’ life expectancy and means they are less likely to access education at any point in their lives.

1.28     As long argued by women’s rights advocates and internationally recognised in the Sustainable Development Goal target 5.4, the provision of gender responsive public services is vital for women’s unequal care load to be reduced and redistributed from households and communities to the state. To be gender-responsive, public services – including health systems, water and sanitation, early childcare and education – should be universally accessible, available, appropriate and adaptable[40]. This means they should be designed and delivered in consultation with women, recognising they are not a homogenous group and have both distinct needs and face multiple forms of discrimination. Vitally, governments should have the resources and policy space to finance their vital services systems such as health and social care in a way that ensures they have the necessary numbers of highly-trained health workers, medicines and infrastructure to match the needs of the population, and to ensure they are accessible to all, including to rural and under-served areas or populations. Improving public services is vital to progress on the fulfilment of girls’ and women’s rights – to education, to health and sexual and reproductive services, to water and sanitation – particularly in times of crisis, and their provision would reduce the unpaid care burden on women.

1.29     DFID’s work to date in bolstering international public health in response to the virus is welcome. As the UK Government has recognised in a statement to the Development Committee, convened jointly by the World Bank Group (WBG) and IMF, “the weakness of developing countries’ healthcare systems is one of the biggest risks to the global spread of the virus”. The UK’s announcement of “up to £744 million to support the international response”, including through developing a vaccine and ensuring the supply clean water, is particularly positive[41].

1.30     However, as part of its post-COVID-19 recovery strategy, it is critical that the UK’s trade ambitions do not undermine these efforts to support international public health and other basic services. The pandemic is an important litmus test for the UK’s Global Britain commitment to be a “force for good” in the world[42], by ensuring that the commercial interests do not trump human rights and global health considerations. The forthcoming Integrated Review of foreign policy, defence, security and development will be an opportunity to ensure consistency across these agendas and mainstream gender equality objectives across ODA-spending UK government departments.

1.31     This means, for example, ensuring that trade deals forged with developing and emerging economies do not limit the fiscal policy space of governments – in particular by constraining their ability to decide how to provision public services. This can be achieved by ensuring new trade deals with countries in the Global South do not include provisions which lock-in privatisation of vital services such as water and healthcare through such clauses as standstill and ratchet clauses, as well as clauses that open up opportunities to foreign firms to bid for government procurement contracts. Such provisions can make it almost impossible for countries to reverse privatisation in future even if there is a public need – such as a global pandemic – or a democratic demand to do so. As UN Women observes:

“[P]rivatizing health care without guarantees of access for everyone has reduced services for women and pushed onto them additional care responsibilities for sick family members. This leaves them less time to care for themselves, and to pursue opportunities in school or work to improve their lives”[43].

1.32     Recommendations for UK Government:

• The UK should cancel debt payments to be made in 2020: ActionAid UK supports the Jubilee Debt Campaign call to cancel all external debt to be made in 2020 and to provide emergency additional finance that does not create debt. All principal, interest and charges on sovereign external debt due in 2020 should be cancelled permanently, they should not accrue into the future. We welcome the IMF’s recent decision to cancel $215 million worth of debt in 25 countries for the next 6 months. But given the scale of the challenge more is needed. Cancellation needs to go beyond the IMF to cover all creditors. A process must be started to work out how to bring debts down to a sustainable level once we are past the immediate crisis.
• The UK should use its place on the IMF Board to advocate for an end to loan conditionalities and policy advice that promote austerity and funding cuts to vital public services and social protection, and instead avoid limiting fiscal space for states to build up and sustain robust public health and wider public services systems that will ensure global commitments to gender equality, women’s rights and wider development are met.
• As part of its post-COVID-19 recovery strategy, the UK should commit to, resource, and implement trade and investment policies that do not restrict women’s access to publicly financed gender-responsive public services in childcare, education, health, and water and sanitation.

2. The impact of the outbreak on UK aid funding in the longer term.

2.1              COVID-19 threatens to reverse development gains and to stall progress towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ActionAid are particularly concerned about the impact of the crisis on gender equality and women and girls’ rights. Emerging evidence suggesting COVID-19 will have distinctly gendered implications within the poorest and most marginalised communities, with the government themselves saying they are concerned about progress towards SDG 5 on gender equality[44]. It is vital then that, in the longer term, the UK government ensures the current proportion of UK aid spent on programmes that target gender equality as a policy objective is, at the very least, maintained and, ideally, increased[45]. DFID and other government departments (OGDs) responsible for aid spending must also work to mainstream gender across all their work[46].

2.2 ActionAid knows from experience that VAWG increases in emergency situations[47] and is likely to be exacerbated by social-distancing measures and reduced access to public services. To remedy this, both now and in the longer term, UK aid funding should be focused towards women’s rights organisations (WROs) in the Global South, with funding directed to the poorest and most vulnerable beneficiaries. Additionally, DFID and OGDs spending aid should ensure their programmes are shaped by the voices of those most familiar with the challenges we seek to address. Consultation with WROs can be done through national networks and must be meaningful, accountable and all costs, including time spent, should be fully repaid. The Gender Action for Peace and Security (GAPS) network has produced a resource outlining what meaningful engagement looks like, particularly for women in conflict affected and fragile states[48].

2.3 More broadly, the COVID-19 crisis throws into sharp relief the need for UK aid funding to remain effective in its purpose and provide value for money for the UK taxpayer. As it stands, UK aid funding through DFID fares reasonably well[49]. This is also true of DHSC and BEIS, both of which, alongside DFID, meet the 2015 Aid Strategy target for all government departments spending aid to be ranked as ’good’ or, ’very good’ in the Aid Transparency Index within five years[50],[51]. OGDs reviewed scored ‘fair’, ’poor’ or ’very poor’.

2.4 COVID-19 clearly shows that progress in international development is not a foregone conclusion. In the longer term, it should be a focus of the UK governments to ensure it is securing maximum aid effectiveness through its funding. This means ensuring that aid spending is fully transparent, can be held up to scrutiny and assessed for its impact. This in turn will ensure that, in what is likely to be a challenging economic context, the UK taxpayer can be confident the UK government is not only effectively addressing poverty and gender inequality but it is also securing value for money in its approach. Where the economy is impacted, the aid budget will be reduced and the imperative to spend every penny on poverty alleviation is even more essential than ever.

2.5  Recommendations for UK Government:

• Through the development of the new aid strategy, and other key processes, ensure UK ODA remains focused primarily on poverty alleviation and gender equality above any commercial, foreign policy or security interests, in line with the 2002 International Development Act, 2014 Gender Equality Act and OECD DAC rules.
• Maintain and increase the current proportion of ODA spent on gender equality, preventing violence against women and girls and on women and girls’ rights policy and programming.
• Ensure UK ODA, wherever it is spent, is fully transparent and accountable to the UK taxpayer, meeting targets set out in the 2015 Aid Strategy, and through the maintenance of key scrutiny bodies and international standards including the International Development Committee, Independent Commission for Aid Impact and the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

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