She Leads in Crisis Report Card

In recent years, donor countries and agencies have engaged in unprecedented discussions and commitments to gender equality, from setting feminist development policies to passing UN resolutions on Women, Peace and Security. But despite the talk, the numbers tell a different story—one in which women and girls still get shortchanged.

Benchmarks

This report uses benchmarks from the High-Level Roundtable on Women and Girls at the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit. CARE chose the most specific, relevant and measurable of the sample benchmarks that would genuinely lead to gender transformative change. These indicators reflect emerging global norms and standards around gender in humanitarian settings, and align to existing commitments rooted in the United Nations Women, Peace and Security Agenda, as well as Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls.

Data Sources

For this report, CARE drew on the most up-to-date information made publicly available by donors and UN agencies to commonly used, credible, multilateral databases. To analyze donor funding, CARE used the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) database, which requires OECD member states to report on gender equality programming and on funding to women’s rights organizations, movements and ministries. For UN agencies, CARE analyzed funding data published on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) digital portal, which categorizes information using the same codes and criteria as the OECD, and considered the basis for a common standard for publishing data on humanitarian funding.

There is currently no universally reliable, systemic, harmonized database available for the data sought on resourcing and supporting women-led crisis response. While some databases exist, most track individual agencies or donors with varying approaches and coding, rendering them unfit for the purpose of cross-actor comparison or tracking funding in aggregate.

Donor Countries

Donor countries were assessed on their reported levels of resourcing to women’s rights organizations, women-led organizations and women’s institutions in crisis-affected areas and funding for gender-equality and empowerment of women and girls programming.

UN Agencies

UN Agencies were assessed on resourcing to women’s rights organizations, women-led organizations and women’s institutions in crisis-affected areas; funding for gender equality and empowerment of women’s and girls’ programming; and inclusion of women and women’s organizations in leadership and equal participation in humanitarian responses and crises.

CARE Self-Assessment

Six of the seven indicators in this report are relevant to CARE and not just donors and UN agencies. CARE funds women’s rights and women-led organizations, has implementing partners, aspires to gender-transformative programming and has thousands of staff working in crisis-affected countries around the world.

Where do we go from here?

We walk the talk. We hold major aid actors to account on gender equality commitments. We galvanize action on funding and participation of women in leading crisis response.

As part of the aid system, we call on donors, UN agencies and fellow INGOs to:

• Adopt gender-specific commitments to hold the aid system accountable to funding and inclusion of women and girls in crisis response​.
• Systematically track and report funding to and partnerships with women- and girls-led and women’s rights organizations.
• Increase the amount and quality of humanitarian funding that goes to organizations that are led by women or focused on women, girls or gender (including by reducing bureaucratic hurdles to accessing and administering funds, and 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.

Now more than ever, funding and influence must flow into women- and girls-led crisis response, for effective, long-lasting, intergenerational impact. Please sign our global petition.

Footnotes

Indicator 2

For this indicator, CARE has analyzed OECD data which is marked as “gender principal” as a proportion of humanitarian expenditure. According to OECD criteria, projects should be marked gender principal where “gender equality is the main objective of the project/program and is fundamental in its design and expected results. The project/program would not have been undertaken without this gender equality objective.”47

*CARE used 2018 OECD data for donors, except those marked with a single asterisk in the table — Canada, Germany, Norway and Sweden — which are based on updated 2019 OECD data. CARE used IATI 2019 data for UN agencies. IATI and OECD use the same coding and definitions.

**This number illustrates the potential discrepancy between reporting to a public database, such as IATI used in this report and UN reports, as well as variance due to IATI’s coding of “humanitarian activity” which in some situations may be more limited in scope and scale compared to broader funding to fragile states. For example, UNDP notes that based on its internal database, its spending on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment programming in fragile states is 9.6% of total program spending in those countries, an increase from 7.7% in 2018. UNFPA stated that 15.1% of their programs in 2019 were gender targeted, and 94.6% either targeted or mainstreamed, although this is not disaggregated by crisis and non-crisis contexts.48

Indicator 3

Under OECD coding, such funding includes programs that promote gender equality as their core objective “gender principal” (see above) and those that consider “gender equality is an important and deliberate objective, but not the principal reason for undertaking the project/program” (“gender significant”).56 IATI and OECD use the same coding and definitions.

*CARE used 2018 OECD data for donors, except those marked with a single asterisk (*) in the table — Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden — which are based on updated 2019 OECD data. CARE used IATI 2019 data for UN agencies. Note that IATI data is updated on an ongoing basis.

**Note that the Directorate General of European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO), the principal European institution for EU humanitarian relief, has a different gender analysis of its funding. A report published this year on the implementation of its Gender Marker found that in “2016 and 2017, 89% of all DG ECHO-funded actions integrated gender and age considerations either ‘strongly’ (mark ‘2’) or ‘to a certain extent’ (mark ‘1’).”57