The Gendered Face of COVID-19 in the Global South: The Development, Gender and Health Nexus 9781529218855

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH The Development, Gender and Health Nexus

JEAN GRUGEL, MATT BARLOW, TALLULAH LINES, MARIA EUGENIA GIRAUDO, JESSICA OMUKUTI

COVID-19 COLLECTION

JEAN GRUGEL, MATT BARLOW, TALLULAH LINES, MARIA EUGENIA GIRAUDO AND JESSICA OMUKUTI

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH The Development, Gender and Health Nexus

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 954 5940 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-1883-1 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-1884-8 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-1885-5 ePdf The right of Jean Grugel, Matt Barlow, Tallulah Lines, Maria Eugenia Giraudo and Jessica Omukuti to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Bristol University Press Front cover image: Tallulah Lines

Women are disempowered constantly, and if there is a crisis of any kind –​occupation, war, pandemic –​the first people who suffer are women. Isabel Allende, May 2021

Contents About the Authors Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Derailing Development, Exacerbating 1 Gender Injustice one Gender, Development and COVID-​19: 24 More of the Same is Not Working two Unequal Development: What Lies Beneath 46 COVID-​19’s Gender Politics? three Regional Governance: A Missed Opportunity 72 to Tackle COVID-​19’s Gendered Inequalities? four Exacerbating Inequalities: Gender-​Based 94 Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Health five Exacerbating the Gender Gap: COVID-​19 123 and Gendered Inequalities in Work and Education Conclusion 142 Notes References Index

162 164 202

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About the Authors Jean Grugel is Professor of Development Politics at the University of York. She is the Founding Director of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC) in York, which applies interdisciplinary insights to the challenges of inclusive and equitable development (https://​www.york. ac.uk/​igdc). Her research centres on the political economy of development, neoliberalism and post-​neoliberalism and human rights. She is currently working on two large RCUK-​funded projects on health governance in East and Central Africa and reproductive and sexual rights for women and girls in migration in Latin America. Her publications include Demanding Human Rights in the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Handbook of International Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), as well as recent papers in Development and Change, Critical Social Policy, World Development and Human Rights Quarterly. Matt Barlow is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York, where he was also awarded his PhD. He researches the political economy of taxation and the political economy of development in the Global South. Wider research interests include regionalism, global health and the political economy of gender. Previously, Matt has held the position of Post-​Doctoral Research Associate working under the Politics and Governance strand of the [Global Challenges Research Fund] GCRF-​RCUK funded ‘Thanzi la Onse (Health for All)’ and also the GCRF ‘Gender and Health Systems After Covid-​19: The Role of Policy’. He has recently published in New Political Economy and Frontiers in Political Science.

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About the Authors

Tallulah Lines is Research Associate at the IGDC and PhD candidate in Politics at the University of York. She is currently working on the GCRF-​funded project ‘Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls in Latin America’. Her PhD deals with the political impact of feminist artistic interventions in Mexico, and her research interests include feminism and gender in Latin America, social movements and human rights. She is particularly interested in using creative and participatory methodologies in her research. Maria Eugenia Giraudo is Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Warwick. Her main interest lies in how the politics of development in Latin America are conditioned by the changing structure of the global political economy. Her research has been published in journals including Journal of Agrarian Change, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space and Globalizations. Jessica Omukuti is Research Fellow on Inclusive Net Zero at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford. Before that, she was Research Associate and COP26 Fellow at the IGDC at the University of York. She has experience working in sub-​Saharan Africa. Her research interests are in climate justice and equity, climate finance and just transitions to net zero in the Global South.

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Acknowledgements The research for this book was funded by three related projects and we gratefully acknowledge the support of RCUK-​ GCRF for: ‘Gender and Health Systems in Low-​Income and Middle-​Income Countries After COVID-​1 9: The Promotion of Women’s Health and Emerging International Policy Advice’ (GCRF–​University of York); ‘Thanzi la Onse’ (GCRF–​Medical Research Council); and ‘Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls in Contexts of Protracted Crisis in Central and South America’ (GCRF–​ESRC). We would like to acknowledge the support of Professors Paul Revill and Mark Sculpher in the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York and Professor Pia Riggirozzi of the University of Southampton, who lead two of these projects. Thanks too to IGDC at York, where we all worked when we were writing this book. A special thank you to Tara Mundy, IGDC’s magnificent administrator. The research would not have been possible without each other, our families and friends. Jean would like to acknowledge in particular the many years of kindness and care by Valerie Atkinson, Alicia Simione and her sister(-​in-​law) Judith Smith, all the incarnation of feminist friendship, and the inspiration provided by her daughter, Anna. Tallulah would like to thank her mam, Linda, for her inspiration, encouragement, support and for having the warmest sense of humour, and her nana, whose care and generosity has made so much possible. Jessica is grateful to Jean for the opportunity to work on one of the GCRF projects that led to this book, and to Professor Piran White for his mentorship during her time at IGDC. Eugenia would like to extend her thanks to Jean for her mentorship, to her sisters and friends for their inspiration and solidarity, to her parents, and to her husband Jack for his constant care and support. Finally, Matt would like to acknowledge the support

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and guidance of Gillian Mathie, whose encouragement has literally changed his life. He would also like to give a special mention to the next generation, to Rosie, Harriet and Peggy. Currently, strong-​minded girls, they are a small part of the next generation of formidable women and are a trio that he often thought about while writing this book. Researching and writing this book during the intense period of lockdown in 2020–​2021 meant that we worked on it remotely. Each of us coped as best we could with anxieties, whether about our own health and wellbeing or that of our students, families, friends and neighbours as well as the typical struggles with technology and physical distance that came to shape everyone’s lives at that time. We missed the physical contact that develops within research teams –​through meetings, coffees and shared lunches and dinners. At the same time, we were acutely aware that we were privileged –​to be in paid employment during the pandemic, to be in secure homes and to be free from the fear, or the reality, of violence. We hope that our book serves as testimony to injustices that urgently need to be put right and we dedicate it to the women and girls whose lives we have written about here.

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Introduction: Derailing Development, Exacerbating Gender Injustice

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared on 11 March 2020 that the rapid and extensive spread of the coronavirus SARS-​CoV-​2 –​better known as COVID-​19 –​ meant that it should be regarded as a global pandemic. At that point, there were 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 people had died. Just 12 months later, in March 2021, the official death toll from COVID-​19 had risen to 2,769,696, with 126,372,442 reported cases (WHO, 2021). By September 2021, with the pandemic still raging, COVID-​19 had killed more people in the US than the 1918–​1919 flu pandemic (Milman, 2021). The global economic impact, as estimated in May 2021, was in the region of six trillion dollars (Liang et al, 2021). Researchers and international policy-​makers understood very quickly that COVID-​19 was not only a global health emergency, but a multifaceted development crisis. Unlike the 1918–​1919 flu pandemic, COVID-​19 quickly reached all corners of the world. As early as May 2020, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) warned that COVID-​19 was set to undo three decades of progress in human development (UNDP, 2020a). Decline in every area of human development –​broadly understood as a combination of education, income and health services –​was already happening, just three months into the pandemic. According to the UNDP (2020a): ‘The world has seen many crises over the past 30 years, including the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–​09. Each has hit human development hard but, overall, development

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gains accrued globally year-​on-​year … COVID-​19 –​with its triple hit to health, education, and income –​may change this trend.’ Even in the first few months of the pandemic, when the crisis was most acutely experienced in Europe and the Americas, it was recognized that the pandemic and the accompanying global recession would be felt hardest in countries in the Global South (IMF, 2020a). In June 2020, the World Bank (2020a) observed: ‘Economic disruptions are likely to be more severe and protracted in emerging market and developing economies with larger domestic outbreaks and weaker medical care systems; greater exposure to international spillovers through trade, tourism, and commodity and financial markets; weaker macroeconomic frameworks; and more pervasive informality and poverty.’ This World Bank report went on to say that financial resources would be needed to enable low-​and middle-​income countries to meet even the most basic development targets. But, as Kharas (2021) argues, increasing liquidity would only support development if it went hand in hand with reducing inequality. Reducing gender inequality should therefore have been a major concern of governments when planning their responses to the pandemic. Gender was quickly identified as a vital determinant of how the pandemic would affect lives –​above all the lives of the poorest women and girls, in the poorest parts of the world –​because of the particular ways that economic contraction coupled with social distancing policies would negatively impact upon women and girls. Employment and poverty are gendered, and it was recognized that women and girls were likely to face disproportionately negative outcomes and economic instability. Gender-​based violence was likely to increase and intensify, especially as social distancing and stay-​at-​home policies risked isolating women and girls with their aggressors at the same time as cutting off services and support. It was predicted that the concentration of all aspects

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Introduction

of life into the home would intensify the unpaid care burden that would fall above all on women and girls –​something which would be felt particularly strongly by the women who make up over 70 per cent of the healthcare workforce globally, or the disproportionately high number of women working in the care or domestic work sector. Widespread closures of schools meant many girls lost access to their only ‘safe spaces’: schools go some way in protecting girls who are vulnerable to sexual abuse and violence, at risk of early marriage or pregnancy, or likely to have to take on extra caring responsibilities in the home to the detriment of advancing their own education (UN Women, nda; Gender and Covid-​19 Working Group, 2020). Looking back now, from the vantage point of two years after the declaration of COVID-​19 as a global pandemic, we can see that there was considerable concern expressed by policy-​makers about the financial and social costs that it would entail, especially for girls and women. Researchers, academics and civil society actors also mobilized to call for urgent action to try to alleviate the most devastating economic, health and social impacts of the pandemic. In the press, in the publications of international organizations, in health and social sciences journals, and increasingly in webinar series and other online spaces that were facilitated by a wider digital shift during the pandemic, debates unfolded over actions that should be taken. We began the work for this book, therefore, hoping we might find that this very extensive knowledge, delivered in real time throughout the pandemic, had been put to good policy use. As we document here however, sadly, gendered inequalities have only been exacerbated during the crisis. The gap between the actions that should have been taken in light of what was known and understood and the timidity and conservatism of policy responses is largely to blame. As a global community, we always knew the poorest women and girls, in the poorest parts of the world, would pay an inordinately

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high price in jobs, violence, welfare, health, education, loss of dignity and wellbeing during the pandemic, yet we have not been able to engineer policies and programmes that mitigate those costs. What explains this gap between understanding and policies? As feminists have long argued, gender and development have to be understood in relation to each other. Kabeer (2015: 189–​ 190) explains that without gender, we misunderstand the distributive challenge that is at the heart of development. While mainstream development policy-​makers understand the importance of ‘vertical’ inequalities –​between classes or income strata –​they tend to miss ‘horizontal’ inequalities or those ‘between socially defined groups that often cut across income groups’, such as gender, race or caste (Kabeer, 2015: 190). As a consequence, ‘[d]‌evelopment policy has touched on economic inequalities and social discrimination in an intermittent way but has remained largely focused on economic growth and the eradication of absolute poverty’ (Kabeer, 2015: 190). This is further accentuated by the dominance of economics –​that is, an understanding of ‘economics’ characterized by male bias (Elson, 1995) as defined by global institutions like the World Bank –​in international development policy-​making, and the apparent division between the public and the private that is central to mainstream understandings of the economy. As Benería et al (2016: 41) argue: the feminist critique has yet to have a transformative effect on the core tenets of the discipline, despite the presence of feminist voices since the 1970s and the attention that mainstream economics has given to questions about the division of labour in the family and about labour market-​based inequalities. Unlike other fields, economics is largely characterized by a single orthodox core—​also known as neoclassical economics—​which has shut out heterodox alternatives and proved resistant to feminist critiques.

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Introduction

Policy-​making, even in times of acute crisis (or perhaps especially in times of crisis) has failed to grasp the centrality of gender for development outcomes and has as a consequence seen gendered concerns as peripheral, rather than central, to (economic) development. This is aggravated by the fact that, for mainstream economics, women do not act as ‘rational’ economic actors: again, for Benería et al (2016: 54), women ‘have been viewed as being motivated by non-​maximizing objectives, their choices and actions often associated with love, cooperation, empathy, norms, traditions, and the division of labour within their households’. This comes close to regarding women’s labour, inside the home and outside it, as a ‘choice’ of their own making and one that should be understood simply as part of the intimate world of the private sphere, rather than a matter of public concern. If Benería et al (2016) are right, COVID-​19 represents just another manifestation of the gendered crisis of mainstream development that condemns women –​above all, poor women –​to the periphery, economically, socially, culturally and politically. That is, women and girls are not casual collateral damage of policy-​making during COVID-​19 times. Rather, the price paid by women and girls during COVID-​19 can be explained by the failure to take gender seriously enough in development. In making our arguments in this book, we draw on empirical research in two regions of the Global South, namely Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. We explore the way global responses have been shaped by action at different levels –​at elite level in international, regional and national organizations, and by community and activist groups on the ground. We look at how gender has been understood and included, if at all, in COVID-​19 crisis response policy. Throughout, we draw on conceptual frameworks developed by feminist theorists, particularly within International Political Economy, to highlight the areas where the COVID-​19 pandemic has exacerbated long-​standing gendered inequalities in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa.

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The crisis of global development COVID-​19 has not caused the crisis either of gendered inequalities or of global development. Rather, its impact has laid bare pre-​existing fault lines of inequality, including ‘entangled’ inequalities inherited from colonial pasts (Costa, 2018). It has shone a light on long-​standing inequalities and highlighted the fragility of what little progress has been made to address them. These inequalities are akin to what Tilly (1998) calls ‘categorical’ inequalities: Black/​White, formal/​ informal workers, rural/​urban, men/​women, citizen/​migrant, etc (see Costa, 2018). As lived experiences, these categorical inequalities shape access to health, education, housing, water, energy, employment and justice –​the building blocks of a dignified life. These kinds of binary understandings cut across development policies and play a fundamental role in influencing and impacting discourse and policy on gender, in and between the Global South and Global North, usually to the detriment of women and girls living in poorer countries (Mohanty, 2003). Gender is an inescapable thread in the story of the colonial construction of contemporary inequality. As Huber et al (2006) argued in relation to Latin America, for example, the inequalities of today have their deepest roots in the material inequalities, landholding and political power struggles that originated during colonial times. These were the foundations of the region’s economic integration into the global economic structure and served to crystallize the unequal economic relationships that today continue to perpetuate wider development inequalities. For example, these customs and practices contributed directly to the ‘gender asset gap’ (Deere and León, 2003). Today, women own less than a quarter of land in Latin America, because there is still male preference for inheritance and land ownership (Deere and León, 2003: 925). Similarly, Montgomery (2017: 226) argues that imperialism in sub-​Saharan Africa accentuated patterns of gender inequalities in the 19th and 20th centuries because the

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Introduction

Christian missionaries responsible for much of the day-​to-​day work in imposing and maintaining colonial cultural authority served as ‘incubators of Western norms and values’, including deeply unequal gender norms. (Gendered) economic inequalities of this sort have always been and remain at the root of social injustices. Equally, global economic inequality has a geo-​spatial dimension which persists in both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, because the way that the integration of post-​colonial economies into the world economy was carried out positions them in a subsidiary role in trading relationships with countries in the Global North. Gendered and geo-​spatial economic inequalities are reinforced by (male) elite dominance of political institutions, racist ideas and practices, and misogynist and hierarchical attitudes to women (Harcourt, 2016). From the 19th century and the 1960s, newly independent states sought to redirect economies and societies in a variety of ways, including sometimes seeking greater levels of national prosperity, through policies that sought to break the links with ex-​imperial centres. But such initiatives had their roots in colonial systems and therefore did not consider gender. Furthermore, they had, on the whole, limited success, outside perhaps the largest of the post-​colonial states such as India and Brazil. By the end of the 20th century, as the Global South emerged from the devastating experiences of massive indebtedness of the 1980s, after a period of huge borrowing in an effort to subsidize economic development (the ‘lost decade’ as it came to be called), they were still experiencing more pronounced gender inequality than countries in the Global North. These inequalities are critical in determining whose voice is heard both on the global stage and within countries. This set of combined circumstances means that inequality is not a matter of individual disadvantage. Rather, it is the outcome of gendered political, social, economic and cultural structures forged in colonial times, that continue to actively create and perpetuate intersectional advantages and disadvantages.

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The onset of neoliberalism, beginning in the 1990s, has only worsened inequalities. Under neoliberalism, mainstream development policy-​makers put their faith in the roll-​back of states in favour of market-​led development, a new version of globalization that was supposed to produce a ‘flat’ world (Friedman, 2007) which levelled the playing field not only between the Global North and Global South, but also between men and women. They believed that this would occur as a result of the diminishing authority of nation states due to the compression of time-​space and new forms of communications; geopolitical changes such as the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s and the rise of the five major emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS); the growth of free markets; and the spread of technology (Munck, 2021). Needless to say, this brave new world of limitless possibility failed decisively to materialize. Instead, the battery of pro-​ market policies known as the Washington Consensus, introduced across most of the Global South in the 1990s, exacerbated inequalities, including gendered inequalities. Governments dismantled tariffs, cut public spending and gave precedence to markets while dramatically reducing the role of the state, which traditionally cushioned the gendered impact of economic inequalities through welfare policies which benefited women, especially those with families. Despite the sweeping ambitions of neoliberalism to remake the world, the achievements of this period were limited and chiefly fiscal in character –​namely deficit reduction and inflation control. Meanwhile, the failure to create opportunities for decent work in cities and the continued reliance on agricultural exports and natural resources, combined with the reduction in public spending, had dramatic social costs, most notably greater concentration of income in the hands of a wealthy (male) minority. To take Latin America as an ­example –​the region of the world with some of the most deeply entrenched inequalities –​in

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Introduction

2003, 225 million people lived in poverty, with 20 million living in extreme poverty or destitution. This situation was significantly worse than at the start of the neoliberal revolution (ECLAC, 2016). Brazil is one of the most extreme cases: the top 10 per cent of households possessed 50 per cent of national income in 2003, while the bottom 40 per cent had only 10 per cent (ECLAC, 2016). It is perhaps no coincidence that Brazil has experienced the most extreme COVID-​19 crisis in Latin America. Clearly, two decades of neoliberalism had failed to produce anything close to equitable development. Instead, it had encouraged governments to ‘solve’ troubling aspects of regional economies without considering how the ‘solutions’ would impact on persistent inequalities in income, ethnicity, gender, place and job creation, or how it would limit investments in health provision, education and public services, which are essential for wellbeing, health and future prosperity. Neoliberalism has profound and disproportionately negative outcomes for women and girls. For example, it has meant an intensification of the burden of care, through gendered and targeted forms of welfare (Molyneux, 2006), privatization of childcare services, and decreasing investment in public health services. Furthermore, it has led in practice to a ‘feminization’ of labour and migration, accompanied by a deterioration of working conditions –​casualization, flexibilization, violation of international labour standards and low wages (Cornwall et al, 2008) –​as well as other trends that are deeply harmful and exploitative for women (including trans women) and hugely beneficial to men, such as the normalization of the exploitation of women’s, girls’, feminized and gender non-​conforming bodies in the global sex industry (Jeffreys, 2008). Perhaps it was hardly surprising that, in view of neoliberalism’s multiple failures, the question on the lips of policy-​makers and development specialists alike was: ‘after neoliberalism, what?’ (Rodrik, 2002). The problem in answering this question was two-​fold. First, consensus was lacking (Stiglitz, 2008: 41), at least beyond the somewhat vague agreement that addressing

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the social deficit and achieving equity and a redistribution of income and opportunities was needed to deliver governability and growth. Second, the answers that did emerge rarely took gender seriously enough. Ultimately, what was offered was what Horn and Grugel (2018: 74) refer to as a ‘fin de siecle’ moment, an approach that emphasized the need to ‘reboot Western authority’ and address the worst manifestations of inequalities ‘without unpicking the inequalities of economic power or the structures of global financial and trade governance’. Neoliberalism was certainly not abandoned, then, but a broad global consensus on the need to articulate a new understanding of development for the 21st century, in ways that would be more inclusive of the needs and priorities of the Global South and of a multiplicity of ‘forgotten’ actors in development, including women, was reached. One form this consensus took was the articulation of a global development plan which became known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs emerged in 2015 with the aim of charting out an integrated process of development that addressed the inequalities inherited from the past, while promoting greener growth and environmental sustainability. Even without considering the Achilles heel of the SDGs –​namely, how to finance them and ensure equal buy-​in from all actors responsible for fulfilling them, including the private sector –​ progress towards delivery was partial and geographically uneven before COVID-​19 hit (Horner and Hulme, 2019a). In some countries, the failure to tackle in-​country inequalities was clear by 2019 (Horner and Hulme, 2019b: 497). The crisis of COVID-​19 has only intensified inequalities, especially intersectional and gendered inequalities. It has also shattered the global consensus that development should be governed in the interests of people and the planet, an agreement that –​ discursively at least –​underpinned the SDGs. The post-​2020 world of global development is now shaped not by the liberal rhetoric of the SDGs, but by vaccine nationalism, suspicion

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Introduction

of ‘others’ and a lack of care over who pays the price for the ‘global’ exit from the pandemic. The era of liberal global governance since the 1990s has also been characterized by the proliferation of governance above the state. This has had major impacts on programmes of global health, as well as gender and development policies. In Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa it has led to the growing mandates for regional organizations above the state, both to try and diffuse global policies downwards in a coherent fashion and to resist or reinterpret those policies that may not entirely seem to fit. Regional governance organizations have thus come to represent an important tier for policy-​making. They have in some cases enabled governments from the region to talk collectively to international organizations, including United Nations (UN) bodies and health organizations such as the WHO. In some cases, especially in sub-​Saharan Africa, regional organizations also have the authority to dialogue directly with donors in the areas of economic development and health. But it is also the case that, whatever the aspirations of regional organizations, they have not always reflected societal needs or the issues that are of daily concern to ordinary people, such as health, citizenship and gender equality (Grugel, 2006). Before COVID-​19, this was slowly beginning to change (Riggirozzi and Tussie, 2012). Health –​though not always gendered health –​is now regarded as an important area for policy-​making between neighbouring states in the Global South and those policies are sometimes framed through the language of human rights (Riggirozzi, 2014, 2015). As such, organizations such the African Union, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), as well as regional health organizations and regional arms of the WHO are increasingly seen as ways to enable governments to coordinate their responses to health and development crises and, in theory at least, share relevant expertise and know-​how.

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

The onset of COVID-​19 challenged these assumptions and tested the capacities of regional bodies to coordinate responses to a crisis that, in most cases, has affected every member state in the region simultaneously. Across these regional bodies, there was an early and shared understanding that the challenges that the pandemic would bring would not be experienced equally by all in society, with women and girls predicted to shoulder a greater socio-​economic burden. Therefore, to differing extents, organizations in both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa were able to recognize the gendered implications of lockdown, social distancing policies and economic recession. These centred principally around the high levels of women who work in the informal sector without social security protections, increases in care burdens, increases in gender-​based violence, reduced access to sexual reproductive health services and increased barriers to girls’ education. We show here that regional organizations were quick to point out and pinpoint how the pandemic would exacerbate pre-​existing gender inequalities; unlike in earlier economic and health crises, gender was visible from the start in regional level discussions. However, this did not necessarily translate into national policy-​making. Early understanding of what the pandemic would cost to women did not lead to the introduction of policies to mitigate those costs effectively. Similarly to Adhikari et al (2020), our research shows a significant gap between regional recommendations and national responses and raises important questions around how to deliver more equitable crisis governance in the future. Gender, health and development during and after COVID-​19 Equitable access to high quality healthcare is a human right, a measure of state capacity and a core development goal. But access to and provision of health and care are fundamentally

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Introduction

gendered. This is true everywhere, but the consequences are especially marked within health systems with limited and partial public provision. Women and girls experience gendered inequalities as health and care providers –​whether formal or informal –​and as people in need of care. As Sen and Östlin (2008:2) argue, ‘gender relations of power … are among the most influential of the social determinants of health’. Gendered inequalities lead to poor health outcomes, Sen and Östlin (2008) suggest, because of discriminatory values, norms and practices within society and health systems, and because men and women experience differential exposure to health risks. Failure to invest sufficiently in the provision of sexual and reproductive health services, including but not limited to pregnancy and childbirth, leads to poor health outcomes, trauma, shame and stigma for millions of women worldwide (Glasier et al, 2006). These were identified as key areas where progress was lagging even before the onset of COVID-​19 in 2020 (Zuccala and Horton, 2018). In light of this and many other factors, meeting SDG 3 –​ which has committed all governments globally to ensuring healthy lives and the promotion of wellbeing for all by 2030 –​is an extremely ambitious target that will require huge investment in health services for women, as well as delivering a wider agenda of social change to promote more equal lives for women and girls. Key steps to meeting SDG 3 include gendering essential health packages, which all low-​ and middle-​income countries are encouraged to do as a way of beginning to meet the demand for health for all, as well as rethinking aid and development programmes to introduce more effective gender equity targets. Currently, around 58 per cent of aid does not have gender equity targets (UN Women, ndb). Transforming health service provision is not the only area where change is urgently needed, however. Societal and family biases have traditionally meant that women and girls carry an additional burden as health and care givers. Care is highly

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feminized in all societies due to prevailing gender norms and expectations and, as such, it is under-​valued in societies and in policy. As Harman (2016: 525) observes, women ‘are overly represented in this low/​unpaid reproductive economy but under-​represented in the paid productive economy’, meaning that the unequal burden of care girls and women assume directly contributes to experiences of both income and asset inequalities and a form of ‘conspicuous invisibility’ in health governance. During the COVID-​19 pandemic, these pre-​existing structural and normative inequities have been accentuated, relegating ‘women to the realm of care work [and putting] them on the frontlines in an epidemic, whilst often excluding them from developing the response’ (John et al, 2020: 65). In March 2020, as COVID-​19 was tightening its grip over most of the Global North in the pandemic’s first wave, Davies et al (2020) wrote: Front-​line health professionals and workers most exposed to the infectious disease are likely to be women: nurses, nurse aides, teachers, childcare workers, aged-​care workers, and cleaners are mostly women. And 67 per cent of the global health workforce is female, according to a 2019 study. Among those workers –​many part-​time and casual, and most likely to be laid off or given shorter hours during the crisis and post-​crisis –​ women are the largest group. Compared with men, women are more likely to be casual workers without sick leave/​isolation leave work entitlements. Migrant women workers –​ nurses and domestic workers –​ experience double discrimination through both low-​ paid and/​or casual work, with greater risk of wage loss and unemployment, limited access to healthcare and protective items. It is not surprising that many studies on how to manage the COVID-​19 crisis in a way that will foster equitable outcomes

14

Introduction

identify a critical need to begin to address the gendered inequalities in health and other areas of development, that have become so much more acute during this period. Researchers were quick to point out at the start of the pandemic that improving services for women’s health was essential and should be non-​negotiable for governments, even in the context of the pandemic. The UN Covid-​19 Research Roadmap, for example, identifies improving women’s ‘access to sexual and reproductive health services, gender equity and women’s empowerment in society’ as one the ‘best buys’ that states can invest in now (United Nations, 2020a). Similarly, UNICEF (2020a) also picked up this issue, highlighting five key actions that governments needed to take urgently: 1. Care for caregivers, mainly women and children, including ensuring they are in receipt of emergence welfare programmes to enable them to cope and to mitigate the impact on the household of the health crisis and the introduction of family-​friendly policies to protect female workers. 2. Programmes to address the increase in gender-​based violence, including the importance of development unique approaches for and with adolescent girls. 3. The maintenance of core health and education services and systems to ensure minimum standards of care for vulnerable women, adolescent girls and children. 4. Enabling voice and engaging with women’s and youth rights networks to ensure the meaningful participation of girls and women in all decision-​making processes and sharing of key communications. 5. Ensure gender data are available, analysed and actionable, to track the impact of COVID-​19 on women and girl’s public health and on their social and economic outcomes. By May, UN Women and the Inter national Labour Organization (ILO) called urgently for a ten-​point plan to

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address gender in the long-​term response to COVID-​19 (UN Women, 2020a). They recommended that governments: 1. Design and implement gender-​responsive crisis responses with long-​term solutions. 2. Expand and invest in universal gender-​responsive social protection. 3. Mitigate the pandemic’s impact on enterprises and employment, with a tailored and gender-​responsive approach to reaching women-​owned micro, small and medium-​sized enterprises. 4. Provide healthcare and other front-​line workers with occupational safety and health equipment (for example Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), menstrual hygiene products), decent working conditions and adequate remuneration, including equal pay for work of equal value. 5. Allocate additional resources to address discrimination and violence against women and girls in COVID-​19 national response plans, including effective measures to reduce the risks of heightened levels of domestic violence. 6. Invite businesses to sign and implement the Women’s Empower ment Pr inciples that foster responsible business conduct. 7. Encourage financial stakeholders to leverage the power of capital markets and movements of resources to steer responsible business conduct and foster inclusive corporate cultures. 8. Design economic recovery packages that recognize and place a value on unpaid care work and care jobs. 9. Ensure that gender equality is front and centre of learning and skills development during response and recovery to ensure that no girls are left behind. 10. Collect and report on gender statistics and sex-​disaggregated data to inform crisis response and recovery plans.

16

Introduction

Civil society organizations and researchers, meanwhile, went even further. King, A. et al (2020), writing in The Lancet, argue that current gender systems should be reordered to ensure an equitable exit from the current pandemic. They argue in particular for economic change: The economic arrangements, policy frameworks, and market forces that determine the distribution of paid and unpaid labour across society are powerful structural determinants of health. The way that paid and unpaid labour is inequitably divided between men and women is central to the perpetuation of gender inequalities across the globe, and the ways that such divisions can be shifted or disrupted offer critical opportunities to modify the gender-​differentiated effects of Covid-​19 on health. (King, T. et al, 2020: 80) This overhaul of economic structures and systems also underpins the recovery plan created by the Association of Women in Development (AWID). AWID (2020: 3) argue that ‘social infrastructure and systems of care for people and the environment are the foundations of thriving economies’ and therefore that factors including health systems ‘must become the new indicators for successful economies’. Current global tax and trade systems which either overtly favour or turn a blind eye to illegal behaviour from multinational corporations ‘divert valuable public resources from those who rely on them’ –​public resources which could be invested in health systems (AWID, 2020: 4). Finally, the commodification of health for corporate profit through ‘patent protection and intellectual property laws’ which restrict access to life-​saving vaccines and medicine –​including the COVID-​19 vaccine –​is a deadly practice, which kills disproportionately more people in poorer countries, especially in the Global South (AWID, 2020: 5). AWID call for this commodification of health to be rejected and overturned.

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

We have highlighted these calls for urgent action to protect women and girls to show how far it was understood, from the outset of the pandemic, that COVID-​19 would set gender inequality back by decades, unless governments took steps to prevent this happening. How far or not government policies have taken heed in practice –​ through policy implementation –​of these early recommendations is one of the primary questions driving our work in this book. We consider how far governing institutions walk the walk, as well as talk the talk, on gender in times of crisis. A second question is whether well-​meant policies that reflect gendered concerns, at least to some extent, address the nature, scale or urgency of gendered need; and whether, in fact, they may actually make some problems worse. Is there a gap between what governments seek to do compared to actual outcomes? If so, is this because governments do not fully understand gendered differences in health, work, care and so on, or because they cannot deliver on their promises? Or is it because prevailing gendered social norms and structural injustices have become the ‘normal’ practices of everyday life to the extent that they are not even recognized as problematic, and are reiterated and reinstated through the COVID-​19 policy response? Given the already fragile situation for many girls and women, and the rapidly increasing evidence that pre-​existing gendered inequalities are only worsening, it is important to answer these questions in a way which centres girls and women and which will ensure that the commitment to ‘leave no one behind’, which underpins the SDGs, is met by 2030. Scope, methods and coverage A few points are in order to make here. First, given the critical importance of gender for understanding the development crisis that COVID-​19 brings with it, we have written this book at speed. In fact, we have written this in real time, as the pandemic itself is unfolding. The bulk of the research for this

18

Introduction

book took place between June 2020 and June 2021. This covers the period of the pandemic where there was no vaccination programme (up to January 2021), and before the widespread roll-​out of vaccines in sub-​Saharan Africa and most of Latin America. We have done our best to gather and analyse data and to contextualize those data in relation to pre-​COVID-​ 19 realities. Inevitably, some will be outdated by the time of reading, and other data will be corrected with time. We ask our readers to bear with us in this respect. Second, we have gathered most of our data from two regions of the Global South, namely Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, two regions which, from a health perspective, have experienced the pandemic very differently; deaths in sub-​ Saharan Africa are currently (as of 17 October 2021) c. 179,000 compared to c. 1.5 million in Latin America (JHU, 2021). We justify this geographical scope for the following reasons: • Despite epidemiological differences, both regions face significant impact to development as a result of the pandemic, with the prospect that vital SDG targets will be significantly delayed or missed altogether. • The existence of high levels of indebtedness in both regions combined with differential levels of donor dependence shape national and regional response in planning for after COVID-​19. • The persistence of high levels of inequality in both regions, and in particular gender inequality, affect women and girls’ access to decent work, education and healthcare, raising the question of how or whether states in these regions will seek to protect the most vulnerable from the immediate and long-​term economic and social impacts of the pandemic. Third, in this book we have used a mixed methods approach, which is typical in political economy of development studies. This meant that we undertook a qualitatively led, theoretically informed project that was supported by wide-​ranging statistical

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data. The qualitative element was conducted through 16 semi-​structured expert interviews from organizations and independent specialists in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, including: non-​governmental organizations (NGOs), regional bodies, think tanks and activist groups. These organizations and individuals were selected for distinct reasons. In some cases, their work on the ground in trying to meet some of the challenges that COVID-​19 brought to women and girls, head-​on, illustrated the scale of the gendered challenge. In others, they were able to provide an insight of views from regional organizations which enabled us to trace the disconnect between regional recognition and national policy implementation. These interviews were essential for obtaining situated knowledge and information on real-​time lived experiences of gendered pandemic responses. Additionally, we draw on some early interview data from a large Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) –​Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) GCRF-​ESRC project that two of us are involved with, ‘Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls’, with grateful thanks to PI Professor Pia Riggirozzi.1 These in-​ depth interviews were carried out with NGOs providing direct support to women and girls on the move in Mexico and Brazil. We also draw on primary and secondary research data conducted under the politics strand of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF-​MRC) project that two of us are part of, ‘Thanzi la Onse’, with grateful thanks to Thanzi leads Professor Mark Sculpher and Professor Paul Revill.2 This research project’s core objective is to improve population health and reduce health inequalities in Malawi, Uganda, Southern and East Africa more widely. This qualitative evidence is strengthened by qualitative and quantitative data drawn from analyses of policies, policy briefs, reports, blogs, opinion pieces, webinars and related sources produced by domestic, regional and international institutions and organizations in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa.

20

Introduction

Data gathered through the interviews and documentary analysis were analysed using inductive thematic analysis and set within feminist epistemology. As such, we were able to identify major themes emerging from the data from a gender perspective, in order to gain a fuller understanding of the reality of the COVID-​19 impact on the ground, and policy priorities in response. Ethics approval was secured from the University of York Ethics Committee for this project in July 2020. Data has been shared from ‘Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls’ and ‘Thanzi la Onse’ in accordance with the ethics approval gained for these projects from the University of Southampton and the University of York respectively. The book unfolds as follows: Chapter One explores the conceptual space that gender and intersectionality occupy in development debates and in relation to COVID-​19. We use this chapter to introduce the conceptual and analytical tools employed throughout the book to draw out the multifaceted gendered crisis of development that COVID-​19 has exacerbated. Chapter Two then explores the gendered inequalities that are produced, reproduced and yet often invisibilized by the global political economy. In this chapter, we explain how women are made vulnerable by the ways they are integrated into and excluded from the global political economy in both the so-​called ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains. We show how the rules governing global finance actively worsen health, income and employment security for the poor, especially poor women, and those located geographically in, or from, the Global South. We then explore, in Chapter Three, a critical tier of global health policy –​region-​level policy-​making in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa –​which became an important site for the provision of health advice and health activism in the early 21st century but which now faces challenges from rising demands for ‘nationalist’ approaches to global problems. In

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

particular, we analyse the disconnect that exists between growing evidence of a gendered understanding of COVID-​19 at a regional level on the one hand, and gender blindness in policy implementation at national level on the other. We argue that regional bodies are cognizant of the gendered challenges presented by COVID-​19, but they are unable to push national governments to implement policies that protect women and girls. Why national governments have been unable or unwilling to take up the recommendations put forward by regional experts, or have implemented them late and partially, is an important question that emerges from our research. We do not claim to be able to answer this fully, since it would require us to divert the reader away from the primary focus of this book, the gender–​health–​development nexus. But, we argue, the failures of regional health governance revealed in our analysis suggests that there are critical limits to the global governance of health and development and that strengthening both the role of regional experts and regional–​national interactions, so that policy-​makers can benefit from expertise rooted in the experiences of their own countries and those of their neighbours will be critical for better responses in the future. In Chapters Four and Five we present our findings thematically. Chapter Four analyses the challenges that women face through gender-​based violence and access to sexual and reproductive health services. Through this analysis we show how the unequal and harmful policy response to COVID-​19 ultimately ends up playing out through the bodies of women and girls. These critical challenges to health and wellbeing cost women and girls their lives and, structurally, they affect all areas of development, from human wellbeing to economic growth. Chapter Five then continues this discussion by exploring the long-​standing socio-​economic inequalities and gendered social norms which have meant that women and girls have faced heightened challenges in labour –​both paid and unpaid –​ and education during the pandemic. We show how women’s right to work has been undermined, and the rights of girls

22

Introduction

and women to education have been threatened. Although we separate our analysis over two chapters, we emphasize how gendered challenges during and after COVID-​19 are intricately linked to the way that the global political economy is engineered. Finally, we conclude by bringing together the main findings of the book. Here, we offer the book’s findings as a platform that not only highlights the gendered development challenges that have been exacerbated by COVID-​19 but also as a contribution to discussions as to how policy in the future can best protect and promote the rights of women and girls, and put forward a plan for building a more equitable post-​ COVID world.

23

ONE

Gender, Development and COVID-​19: More of the Same is Not Working

Introduction In this chapter, we examine what taking a gendered approach to the multifaceted crisis of COVID-​19 means and why it is important to do so. Gender can be understood as a complex process of social construction of identities which we perform (Butler, 2006) along a spectrum where male and female are just two (binary) identities (Mazur and Goetz, 2010). It is also an ‘analytic category’ (Waylen, 1997: 206) that provides a lens to look at policy, institutions, education, health, welfare and the global economy, as well as the so-​called ‘private sphere’ of family, relationships and community, and the interactions between them. As Peterson (2005: 500) observes, the discussion of women has come in recent years to occupy a greater space in mainstream debates about development, but often in an uncritical manner where women are ‘ “added” to prevailing analyses’, without any systematic probing of why or how the global political economy creates and reinforces the marginalization of women, girls and other groups. Taking a gendered approach to development is very different to simply adding women in. Feminist political economy challenges mainstream ways of interpreting social phenomena and, by extension, promotes equitable policy responses that work for women and girls. Such an approach recognizes that embedded male biases and gender blindness

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Gender, Development and COVID-19

exist within global development and, if not addressed, lead to poor outcomes that accentuate gender-​based inequalities, even if policies are well-​intentioned. As a result, feminists have consistently called for the concepts and tools for understanding both policy and the social world to be gendered in ways that acknowledge the complexity and intersectionality of gender (Mazur and Goetz, 2010), tackle the often invisibility of gender in policy and outcomes, and stop the reproduction of gendered disadvantage. We begin by explaining the relationship between gender, intersectionality and development. We elaborate briefly on what we understand by the term ‘women’ and why we have chosen to focus on women and girls as an empirical category in this book. Next, we situate the COVID-​19 crisis in the longer trajectory of gender and development, identifying continuities in conceptualizations and approaches to gender in COVID-​19 policy, especially with regards to who and what is in/​visibilized. Finally, we argue that in order to ‘build back better’ in a way which is empowering for girls and women, a feminist political economy approach can be used to understand the complexities of girls’ and women’s experience during COVID-​19. If applied to policy, this would create pandemic recovery plans that are feminist recovery plans. Gender, intersectionality and development The twin assumptions that ‘gender’ exclusively refers to ‘women’ and that women are a homogenous group with the same experiences and priorities are overly simplistic and problematic. In order to better understand how different groups are experiencing the COVID-​19 crisis and –​crucially –​ to develop policies which reach the most marginalized, it is essential to amplify our understanding of what taking a gendered approach means, and of intersectionality. ‘Women’ is one category on a spectrum that includes men, gender non-​conforming, gender fluid and trans individuals.

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Yet, gender policies tend to only focus on women (Harcourt, 2016). Talking only about women in gender policies visibilizes them as victims of discrimination but at the same time it invisibilizes perpetrators of patriarchal violence, individually and structurally (Debusscher, 2012). It also runs the risk of pigeonholing women into identities which fit with traditional understandings of women –​often, this is as mothers and/​or wives. By extension, the same thing happens with men: they are less likely to be dealt with as fathers or husbands in policy, and more as workers or citizen-​subjects. So, rather than empowering women, sometimes gender policies can reinforce traditional gender roles and fail to capture the complexities of gendered experience. Furthermore, invisibilizing marginalized genders which do not fit into binary understandings of women and men presumes that they do not face discrimination or challenges as a result of their gender expression, thus leaving them unacknowledged and unprotected in policy. It is already clear that, in relation to COVID-​19, gender non-​conforming individuals and communities are at considerable risk of being left out of policies and their needs unrecognized; they may also have also faced intensification of gender-​based health discrimination and violence during the COVID-​19 pandemic in ways which manifest differently from women’s experience (Astles, 2020; HRC, 2020; Perez-​Brumer and Silva-​Santisteban, 2020). It is more problematic than first appears to define what we mean by ‘women’, and feminist scholars have debated this at length (see Moi, 2001; Harcourt, 2016: 3). One of the most important elements of this in the context of global development policy-​making is not simply the complexity of gender identity or gender non-​conformity, but the multiple intersectional differences between women, which means there is no unified experience of womanhood. Race, ethnicity, age, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, migrant status and social class all contribute to how women experience the world and how (and if) policies address their needs and rights. Recognizing

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Gender, Development and COVID-19

intersectional differences is fundamental, since these lead to different experiences of discrimination and privilege. Corus et al (2016: 212–​213) explain that ‘the more socially disadvantaged identity markers that a person possesses, the more cumulative discrimination he or she will face’ and ‘individuals at the intersections of multiple disadvantages are often vulnerable to “policy invisibility” because they are inconspicuous to policy and thus unsupported’. Intersectionality is more than just a checklist of differential identity characteristics, although this is potentially what it has become in mainstream development approaches (Rai, 2018: 153). Dhamoon (2011) argues that intersectionality ‘foregrounds a richer ontology than approaches that attempt to reduce people to one category at a time, it treats social positions as relational, and it makes visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it’; essentially, intersectionality is a ‘critique of the work and effects of power’ (Dhamoon, 2011: 230–​231). It is not simply about identifying who is at more of a disadvantage, but unpacking how disadvantages are produced and reproduced through processes such as ‘discourses and practices of gendering, racialization, ethnicization, culturalization, sexualization’ within ‘historically constituted structures of domination such as racism, colonialism, patriarchy, sexism, [and] capitalism’ (Dhamoon, 2011: 234). A proper understanding of intersectionality is crucial in avoiding colonialist approaches which portray women in the Global South as ‘third world women’ who share an inherent identity that separates them from women in the Global North. Not only are these binary identities misleading and inaccurate, but crucially, they unjustly and erroneously position women in the Global South as victims and those in the North as saviours (Mohanty, 1991). The characterization of ‘third world women’ as inherent victims also fails to explore the misogynistic structures and behaviours embedded, consciously and unconsciously, in policy and institutions. Failure to

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

address these shifts responsibility away from institutions and policy-​makers to address the deep-​rooted structural causes that perpetuate some women’s disadvantaged positions. Rai (2018: 153) argues that ‘the neoliberal discursive turn within development has impacted upon the nature and manner of the representation of the traditional subject of development discourse: the Third World Woman’. She argues that now: accompanying the standard descr iptions of ‘the Third World Woman’, her poverty, exploitation and disempowerment is the shift in the responsibility for overcoming these. Increasingly, representations of poor women’s successful management of the debilitating conditions of their poverty-​stricken life through the exercise of their agential capacities fill the institutional reports of various development agencies including state institutions. Recognizing the agency of women in developing countries is obviously an important advance. However, women still appear to exist in a vacuum in which they are the only gendered players, and the only ones responsible both for being in, and for elevating themselves out of, their comparatively disadvantaged position. Why focus on women and girls? We insist on the importance of recognizing the complexities and multifaceted nature of gender. Gender is not synonymous with ‘women’ in a narrow and traditional understanding of the term. At the same time, we agree that there is a need to develop policies that specifically empower and support girls and women and address their particular needs, always with intersectional differences in mind, and clearly situated as part of wider patriarchal systems and structures which disadvantage and cause harm to women and girls. This dedication to understanding

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Gender, Development and COVID-19

and addressing women’s experience, together with constraints that include our collective expertise, space and informational challenges, mean that, in this book, we focus on the impact of COVID-​19 response policies on women and girls; but we do so in the spirit of recognizing that this must form part of a wider strategy on gender for an equitable recovery from the COVID-​19 pandemic. Misogyny is the cause of the profound disadvantage and discrimination that women and girls face everywhere in the world. ‘Nowhere in the world do women share equal social and economic rights with men or have the same access as men to productive resources’ (True, 2012: 3). Globally, ‘gender-​ based violence is the leading cause of death of women between the ages of 19 and 44’ (True, 2012: 8) and women are more likely than other genders to face gender-​based violence at personal and structural levels. In many ways, women and girls’ situation has worsened in recent decades: women in developing countries now have less access to formal jobs, continue to earn significantly less than men, and are much more likely to be trafficked for sexual exploitation (Rai, 2018). In neoliberal capitalist societies, paradoxically, these factors are often normalized and even championed as empowering. Everywhere in the world, progress made towards achieving women’s rights is fragile and under threat. In Latin America, the so-​called ‘gender agenda’ has been co-​opted by right-​wing conservatives who have turned it into a negative ideology, and who are intent on reversing or stalling advances made on gender equality (Biroli and Caminotti, 2020; Zaremberg et al, 2021). Despite –​or perhaps, because of –​this, contemporary fourth wave feminism is growing exponentially in Latin America, with gender-​based violence and sexual and reproductive rights at the centre of feminist campaigning (Gago, 2018; Gago et al, 2020). The strength of the movement and the content of their demands certainly goes a long way in demonstrating that there is just cause to continue focusing on the battles that are yet to be won for women and girls in the region.

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Women’s movements and feminist activism in sub-​Saharan Africa are as diverse as the countries and communities which make up the region (see Gouws and Coetzee, 2019), and women’s representation in parliament in many countries is considerable –​Rwanda tops the global list for proportion of women MPs, for example. But threats to women’s and girls’ health, rights, dignity and autonomy still exist, often intricately linked to the poverty in the region (African Union, nd; African Union Commission, 2016; AWID, 2020). Widely practised and damaging practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM) and child or early marriage prevail in several countries in the region, although women’s grassroots activism as well as support from development agencies is making important gains in stopping these harmful practices (Clarke et al, 2020; Orchid Project, 2020; Plan International and Girls Not Brides, 2020). Gender in COVID-​19 policy, in relation to lockdowns, health, development, welfare, education, credit, trade or the labour market, is chiefly understood with reference to women, and, usually, their implicit relationships with men. For example, mothers are recognized as taking on the extra burden of childcare (compared to fathers); women are victims of gender-​based violence (perpetrated by men); women’s sexual and reproductive health challenges in times of COVID-​19 tend to be defined as those resulting from relations with men (for example, pregnancy or marriage). This way of conceptualizing gender and women builds on decades of academic and policy work that asserts the importance of gendering development, political economy and public health policies for more inclusive and equitable outcomes, but which, at the same time, has understood gender in this binary way (Rathgeber, 1990; Harcourt, 2016). Yet, governments and policy-​makers do not necessarily have this knowledge and commitment in the forefront of their minds, especially during crises, so women and girls still tend to lose out disproportionately in disaster situations.

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Gender, Development and COVID-19

Experts have warned repeatedly that the COVID-​19 crisis threatens to roll back gains for women by decades (ECLAC, 2020a, 2020b, 2021; Equipop, 2020; Gates, 2020; Gender and Covid-​19 Working Group, 2020; OAS, 2020; UN Women, 2020b, 2020c). Social distancing and ‘stay at home’ policies have, ironically, put women and girls’ lives at risk and policies to mitigate the negative impact of these are scarce. Furthermore, the fallout from the COVID-​19 crisis has left many families in desperate financial situations, which can lead to increased risks for women and girls, in the short and long term. For example, girls may not return to school after the crisis. Risks for sexual abuse, adolescent pregnancy, child or early marriage, and human trafficking all increase for girls and women during crises, therefore profoundly challenging their sexual and bodily autonomy in ways which have lasting consequences. Women are also more likely to lose their jobs and not recover them as quickly as men during and after crises. Development crises are gendered –​COVID-​19 is no exception Like any major health crisis –​including HIV and AIDS, Zika and Ebola –​COVID-​19 is a gendered crisis of health and development that impacts directly and disproportionately negatively on the lives of people –​usually women and girls –​ because of their gender, particularly those who face axes of discrimination in political, economic or socio-​cultural ways (Davies and Bennett, 2016; Harman, 2016; Davies et al, 2020; Gender and Covid-​19 Working Group, 2020; Wenham et al, 2020; Wenham, 2021). These health crises expose gendered fault lines in development: policies implemented in response to COVID-​19 have exacerbated pre-​existing inequalities that have existed for women and girls for decades, and which have been on the development agenda (to differing extents) for years. Across the world, issues that many women and girls face every day, such as gender-​based violence and femicide, greater

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

labour market vulnerability, and significantly increased burdens of care or intensification of social reproductive work have not gone away, in many cases they have worsened. Often stemming from gendered issues related to sexual and reproductive health, women and girls have also suffered setbacks in relation to their health and education needs. Gendered biases, whether conscious or not, are shaping responses by international organizations and governments to COVID-​19. Measures to attempt to curtail the spread of COVID-​19 and at the same time limit where possible the detrimental impact on the economy, understood as a site of profound male bias (Elson, 1995), are not necessarily working for women and girls. In fact, they are accentuating deeply embedded and inequitable norms on the place of women and the importance of their rights to health education, autonomy, dignity and respect in society. As Elson (1995: 11) pointed out a quarter of a century ago, development policies can appear gender-​neutral through the deployment of terms such as ‘the economy’ or the household –​and we might add here, the health system –​but they frequently contain within them hidden assumptions that serve to ‘obscure the distribution of costs and benefits of development processes between men and women’. For decades, development organizations have tried to tackle the discrimination and negative outcomes endured by women. For example, landmark events, the establishment of official positions and commissions, and the creation of policies are key elements of the institutional approach to gender. This includes, for example, the four UN World Conferences on Women, the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women (1946) and latterly UN Women (2010), and agreements such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). These are important in providing regional organizations, governments and civil society guidance for unified strategies or, in the case of civil society, something with which to hold governments to account. For example, the African Union’s strategy for gender

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equality and women’s empowerment 2018–​2028 ‘reflects the multifaceted vision of our continent to realize Agenda 2063 and the SDGs’ (African Union, nd), and member states of ECLAC signed up to the ‘Montevideo Strategy for Implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda within the Sustainable Development Framework by 2030’ (ECLAC, 2017). Both are clearly based around SDGs which are aimed at improving outcomes for women. In Mexico, feminist organizations are using CEDAW to file appeals on the legalization of abortion with the country’s supreme court, arguing that since Mexico is a signatory to CEDAW, it must legalize abortion in order to fulfil its international commitments to protect women’s rights. Before the pandemic took hold globally, a Lancet editorial from 4 January 2020 declared hopefully that the anniversaries of some of the most important institutional developments meant that ‘2020 is set to be a year of milestones for women, gender equity, and health … 2020 is an important year for reflection, commitment, and action’ (The Lancet, 2020: 1). We can separate three distinct phases in approaches to gender within development policy: Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD) and Gender and Development (GAD), which includes the strategy of gender mainstreaming. While important in keeping the conversation focused on gender, each of these approaches has been criticized for not doing enough to actually advance gender equality in communities. Unfortunately, many of the policies implemented by states in response to COVID-​19 have followed some of the earlier and more criticized types of gender and development policy –​sometimes because advice itself from development organizations has not been ‘radical’ –​and have not effectively taken heed of advice from more progressive policy advice organizations. The WID approach, for example, was criticized by feminists for its narrow focus on economic development; for treating women as a homogenous group; for classifying all women as victims; for ‘ghettoiz[ing]’ WID advocates within organizations;

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and for implying that women were ‘solely responsible for the gender inequality problem’ (Debusscher, 2012: 193; Everett and Charlton, 2013; Momsen, 2020). In the mid-​1970s, the WAD approach was developed and while it ‘offers a more critical view of women’s position than does WID … it fails to undertake a full-​scale analysis of the relationship between patriarchy, differing modes of production, and women’s subordination and oppression’ (Rathgeber, 1990: 493). Thanks to the theorizing of feminist academics and Global South feminist and development groups, the GAD approach was developed in the 1980s, wherein it was recognized that gender is a social construct and consequently (binary) gender relations are affected and shaped by development policy; intersectional differences were also highlighted to emphasize that women are not a homogenous category (Rathgeber, 1990; Everett and Charlton, 2013; Rai, 2018; Momsen, 2020). Despite positive changes in the way gender is conceptualized, GAD –​like WID –​has been criticized for being too top-​ down and focused on what women can do for development, not what development can do for women (de Jong, 2016; Mukhopadhyay, 2016; Momsen, 2020). Currently, the official strategy in international organizations and many NGOs to promote gender equality in development is gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming is defined by the Council of Europe (2004: 12) as: ‘The (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policymaking.’  Despite the potentially transformative nature of gender mainstreaming, with its foregrounding of gender relations and emphasis on shared responsibility between men and women to achieve equality (Debusscher, 2012), feminists have criticized gender mainstreaming almost since its inception (de Jong, 2016) and now ‘a critical mass of evaluation and comment’ broadly deems it a failure (Tolhurst et al, 2012: 1825–​ 1826). Principally, critics argue that gender mainstreaming’s

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Gender, Development and COVID-19

potentially radical impact has been watered down (de Jong, 2016; Mukhopadhyay, 2016), and that it is too reminiscent of earlier failed paradigms (Debusscher, 2012; Tolhurst et al, 2012; Mukhopadhyay, 2016; Rao and Sandler, 2016). Rai (2018: 151) agrees and suggests that ‘because it is a less “threatening” approach, planning for Women in Development is far more popular’. COVID-​19 policy responses: the risk of failing to protect and empower women Given the limitations and problems of gender mainstreaming within development, and the failure to adequately deal with gendered issues in previous health crises, the risk that COVID-​ 19 response policies would increase vulnerabilities for many women, without providing sufficient mitigation policies to ease or eradicate these vulnerabilities, was real. Indeed, global social policies to combat the spread of COVID-​19 introduced periodically throughout the pandemic are characterized by social distancing and stay-​a t-​h ome measures which, paradoxically, in many ways increase risks to women and girls. Yet there is a lack of simultaneous policies to protect women and girls from the consequences of lockdowns. For example, long-​term school closures risk substantially increasing unpaid care work, which is disproportionately carried out by women and girls. Girls who are out of school are also at higher risk of sexual abuse, early pregnancy and marriage, and of not returning to education after the pandemic. Yet in many parts of Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, over a year since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, schools remained closed. At the very outset of the pandemic, there were closures of entire sectors of business that were predominantly populated by women, such as informal market trading, or the service and tourism sectors. Over a year since the onset of the pandemic, these sectors are still struggling, with travel, tourism and social

35

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

activities still heavily restricted. This means women have found themselves in precarious employment situations throughout the duration of the pandemic, or compelled to work in risky conditions, especially since more women than men are employed informally in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa and therefore they do not count on state or corporate support if they do not work. Furthermore, the sectors which are prioritized for protection tend to be male-​dominated, such as construction. Overstretched hospitals and health centres and closures of women’s health services leave girls and women at increased risk of illness or health complications. The likelihood that girls and women will need to care for sick relatives who cannot be treated in hospitals also increases. For those women who make up over 70 per cent of the healthcare workforce, there are substantial risks to their health and wellbeing from overworking and/​or lack of PPE. As the crisis has drawn on, so have these challenges. Finally, mass social distancing policies have led to isolation from formal and informal networks of support. They have also increased other factors such as stress, economic tension and changes in bargaining power. All of these things mean women and girls are at increased risk of intimate partner or sexual violence and are isolated with their aggressors. Despite this dangerous mix of secondary effects on women and girls caused by COVID-​19 social distancing policies, the policies in place to mitigate negative outcomes are limited, do not expressly reach the most marginalized women, are not comprehensive, and reinforce –​rather than problematizing –​ traditional female identities. In its global gender response tracker (UNDP, 2021), UNDP highlighted gender-​sensitive measures taken in response to COVID-​19, grouping them into three categories: women’s economic and social security, including unpaid care work; the labour market; and violence against women. The number of gender-​sensitive responses vary greatly per country in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa and some

36

Gender, Development and COVID-19

countries have no known policies at all. Where policies exist, they are often short-​term and/​or reinforce traditional female identities. This is the case for example for cash transfer policies that were implemented in the early months of the pandemic, whereby transfers were targeted at women as mothers. Alternatively, policies recognize women as victims of negative outcomes, but do not address the causes of these, and scarcely implicate others in solutions. For example, of the many information campaigns on gender-​based violence in these regions, only two even mention that anyone other than the female victim should take responsibility in alleviating her situation –​one in Bolivia that mentions toxic masculinity and one in Brazil that suggests that the community must support women who they suspect are suffering violence. Least attention has been given to policies that address unpaid care, and most are information campaigns that aim to communicate that caring is the responsibility of both parents. Less include substantial, structural policies like keeping nurseries or childcare centres open, although it is these, if they were combined with practical and financial support for both parents –​such as paid leave, state-​ owned childcare services, or better paternity leave –​which would more substantially address the uneven load of unpaid care for girls and women (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c). Often, there are such fundamental disagreements about the nature of development and the structures through which it operates that truly productive alliances between those on the ‘inside’ of development institutions and those on the ‘outside’ seem impossible. Harcourt (2016: 3) suggests that ‘feminist theorizing on racism, sexuality, power, embodiment, violence, masculinities and militarism’ is ‘on the edge of development policies and debates’, rather than inside it. Mukhopadhyay (2016: 77) argues that despite years of feminist activism ‘in the field of development’, institutions lag behind feminists in considering how to best operate gender in their work. So how can we better understand the intersections of gender, development and crisis and take action to improve outcomes

37

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

for women in a post-​COVID-​19 world? The answer could lie in feminist political economy (FPE) approaches and feminist activism. Feminist political economy (FPE): the importance of understanding gendered violence and gendered depletion FPE encompasses a ‘critique [of] mainstream economic theory and policy, [and] suggests alternative modes of analysis … [are] absolutely necessary … to capture the complex nature of gender in a globalised capitalist era’ (Rai, 2018: 142–​143). It provides analytical frameworks to better understand how economic and political systems and ideas leave some groups of women profoundly disadvantaged and produce and reproduce everyday discrimination, shining a light on the interconnectedness of oppression that stems from intersections of discrimination based on gender, race, social class, age and more (True, 2012; Elias and Roberts, 2018; Luxton, 2018; Rai, 2018). Through FPE, we find an alternative approach to planning pandemic responses and exit from the COVID-​19 crisis, because it seeks to expose, above all, the permeability and flow between the so-​called ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains, between the apparently separate worlds of policy, politics and the economy, and the world of family and relationships. Furthermore, understanding how economic and political systems disadvantage some women and girls is at the heart of understanding why COVID-​19 is experienced differently between men and women; it is not that women are inherently vulnerable, or that their individual choices lead them to occupy precarious or disadvantaged positions. Rather, the policies implemented globally to combat the spread of COVID-​19 or to attempt to save the (narrowly defined) economy are biased towards men, especially those already occupying privileged positions based on their intersectional characteristics. Taking an FPE approach promises a more integrated and equitable gendered policy response to COVID-​19 and to future global

38

Gender, Development and COVID-19

health crises. In particular, feminist political economists have theorized gender-​based violence and social reproduction extensively in ways which are helpful in the context of COVID-​19. For example, FPE calls attention to the significance of taking a broad understanding of the concept of gender-​based violence. Typically, gender-​based violence is understood to mean intimate partner violence. However, feminist political economists show that far from being a problem which occurs ‘behind closed doors’, it is a problem of the public domain. First, it is evident that the effects of intimate partner gender-​based violence spill over into the so-​called public sphere in a multitude of ways. True (2012: 10) argues that ‘gender-​based violence in public and private spheres prevents women from being able to access economic opportunities, livelihoods, and welfare benefits’ and that, at the state level, direct and opportunity costs related to ‘health care, employment, productivity, and criminal justice’ as a result of violence against women and girls regularly cost states between millions and billions of dollars annually (True, 2012: 10). But there is another dimension to gendered violence that is critical for understanding policy-​making. Gender-​based violence should be understood not just to include ‘economic violence or exploitation occurring in the family’ but also that which takes place within the ‘community and/​or perpetrated or condoned by the state’ (True, 2012: 6). This manifestation of gendered inequity ‘underpins the everyday’ experience of women’s lives through ‘regimes of labour, law, and policy that secure the boundaries of the public and the private, of property, systems of rule-​making and of justificatory ideologies of separation and segregation, where boundaries of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are created and defended by violent acts’ (Elias and Rai, 2019: 214). Violence against women and girls, understood in the broad sense of both intimate home-​based violence and the wider effects of policy-​based violences, increases during socio-​ economic crises (True, 2012; Tanyag, 2018). With regard to

39

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

COVID-​19, it was to be expected that the intricate –​and gendered –​ costs of socio-​economic inequity, combined with policy invisibility, would contribute to gendered spikes of poverty, neglect, overwork and exclusion. It was to be expected, in other words, that high numbers of women would fall into poverty and extreme poverty as a result of COVID-​19. Yet, even though policies addressing gender-​based violence are the most common type of gender-​sensitive COVID-​19 policies worldwide, including in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c), they do not recognize or act upon its structural causes, nor provide adequate long-​term solutions to protect and empower girls and women. Policies such as increasing the number of or access to helplines or continuing to hear cases of domestic violence (see Chapter Four for more discussion of gender-​based violence), are sticking-​plasters at best, unless deeper, structural, socio-​economic issues which exacerbate girls’ and women’s vulnerability to violence are addressed. Policies which deal with women and girls’ unpaid care work are even more scarce in number and limited in impact. Crises, whether health or economic crises, inevitably increase pressures within households, unless governments consciously seek to mitigate their domestic and gendered costs. Even though the predicted increase in women’s unpaid care work and demand for low-​paid care work in the formal economy formed part of early discussions of COVID-​19, in contrast to gender-​based violence, almost no policies exist to tackle it and the depletion that is its consequence (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c). FPE scholars would argue that this is because care work and social reproduction are consistently ‘naturalised, ignored or denied’ (Luxton, 2018: 37) within traditional political economy theorizing (Rai, 2018: 155) and their value continues to be ignored and invisibilized in policy and provision (True, 2012; Luxton, 2018; Rai, 2018). Elias and Roberts (2018: 5) argue that ‘for many feminist IPE scholars, it is social reproduction feminism that offers the greatest

40

Gender, Development and COVID-19

theoretical purchase in terms of the analytical importance it places on issues of material disadvantage and the gendered impacts of neoliberal globalization’. Depletion from social reproduction for individuals, families and communities intensifies in times of crisis and the level of harm caused differs depending on gender, geopolitics and class (Rai, 2018; Tanyag, 2018). Depletion from social reproduction can be understood as the costs women and girls encounter from carrying out social reproductive work, or ‘the violence of everyday life through the non-​recognition of social reproductive work [produces] physical, mental, and socially depleting effects’ (Rai et al, 2014: 89–​90). During the COVID-​19 pandemic, because all aspects of life were pushed into the home, the caring responsibilities that fall mostly to women and girls increased exponentially. As we discuss in more detail in Chapter Five, again, these are not isolated problems for individual girls and women, rather, they are illustrative of COVID-​19 policies which continue to ignore and invisibilize women’s and girls’ experience. In the short and long term, girls’ and women’s increased unpaid care work during the COVID-​19 crisis leads to worse health, education and employment outcomes. Is a feminist COVID-​19 recovery possible? Feminists have battled to shape development policies for decades and indeed they have made important inroads. We can trace a clear chronology in feminist theoretical developments and evidence of these reflected at some levels of development organizations, directly and indirectly (Luxton, 2018; Rai, 2018). In the current context, within and across universities and academic spaces, a considerable amount of research has taken place on gender and COVID-​19 since the onset of the crisis in spring 2020 (although, it has been suggested that less research is being produced and published by women academics, as a result of their caring responsibilities among

41

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

other reasons). Importantly, much of this is consistently updated and synthesized with the explicit intention that it is used by policy-​makers (Gender and Covid-​19 Working Group, 2020; McDougal et al, 2020). Information about gender and COVID-​19 is more easily accessible than ever; the unprecedented and inescapable digitalization of 2020 and 2021 meant that researchers, academics and other influential thinkers were brought together across borders and time zones, and out from behind the closed doors of ticketed and costly events, to participate in webinars, podcasts, videos, blogs and other media which is widely and publicly available online. Among the most-​repeated recommendations from international and regional development organizations is that states must listen to local feminist groups’ advice on COVID-​ 19 gender policies (AWID, 2020; OAS, 2020) in order to ‘build back better’ in a way which empowers and protects girls and women. Indeed, according to Al-​Ali (2020: 340) during the COVID-​19 crisis, in many parts of the world including Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, women’s and feminist organization have been on the ground and: at the forefront of challenging the gender-​blindness of many government interventions and responses to the pandemic. At the same time, they have been stepping in to provide information, support, resources and services. Feminist activists across the globe had to adjust to new realities, creatively think how to continue their previous initiatives and programs, while also having to come up with strategies to deal with the pandemic. In Brazil, domestic workers were entitled to social security protection when lockdown measures were enforced, but it was domestic workers’ unions who informed their colleagues of these rights and supported them to access the support they were entitled to (Acciari, 2020). In Mexico, the state provided food parcels at the beginning of the crisis; when these dried

42

Gender, Development and COVID-19

up, it was the feminists who occupied the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos headquarters in Mexico City from September 2020 who collected donations and handed out food parcels to women in need (Vargas, 2020). Feminist activists have consistently accompanied women seeking legal and illegal abortions in Latin America and continued to demand sexual and reproductive rights through digital and physical protest throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. As well as demonstrating that governments have not done enough to support those girls and women most in need –​so it falls to women to step in to offer support in their communities –​this consistent presence on the frontlines from women’s and feminist organizations suggests that they are certainly well-​informed and well-​placed to advise on how to create more equitable and effective policy solutions going forward. New research also points to the importance of local women’s leadership in communities as the key to more equitable recovery (World Universities Network, 2021). Feminist recovery plans and priorities already exist and they place women at the centre for equitable and empowering recovery. For example, the Feminist Alliance for Rights coordinated a feminist COVID-​19 policy statement, initiated by women’s and feminist organizations from the Global South and marginalized communities in the North, and signed by over 1,600 organizations (Feminist Alliance for Rights, 2020). They prioritize policies in food security, healthcare, education, social inequality, water and sanitation, economic inequality, violence against women, access to information, and abuse of power. We can clearly see here a recognition that women’s disadvantage and discrimination goes far beyond ‘private’ issues and is unavoidably linked to the global political economy. More radical is the Feminist Bailout Manifesto from AWID. They argue that ‘we all deserve a recovery, not only from COVID-​19, but from ages of economic injustice and exploitation’ and that the actions they recommend to reimagine and overhaul the global economy ‘must be taken alongside the

43

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

expertise of local, national, and regional feminist movements which are rooted in the context and lived realities of their people’ (AWID, 2020: 2 and 4). AWID argue for policies like restructuring the labour market, reforming global tax and trade systems, and providing systems of care which remove the responsibility from individual women. Their approach to gender-​based violence stands out: they place gender-​ based violence in a broader structural context and argue that ‘policymakers must invest in the transformative and restorative justice practices developed by communities, researchers, and social movements’ and that ‘adequately funded public services, welfare systems, and secure economic rights can ensure that all those trapped in violent relationships, abusive homes, and exploitative situations have accessible pathways to lives free from violence’ (AWID, 2020: 6). Conclusion In this chapter, we have discussed and problematized the relationship between gender, intersectionality and development in times of crisis. We argued that the narrow definition of ‘gender’ within gender-​sensitive policies can exacerbate damaging understandings of gender identities and invisibilize gendered elements of structures, systems and policy-​making. This risks ignoring the experiences of people of other genders, and re-​victimizing women and girls. In this book, our intention is to focus on how girls and women are experiencing COVID-​ 19, in a way which emphasizes intersectional differences, and recognizes that the complex interplay of gendered global, political and economic systems contrive to exacerbate negative outcomes for women and girls –​in times of crisis and in times of ‘normality’. During COVID-​19, social distancing policies have exposed the fault lines in gender and development, and national-​level policies have done little to mitigate the ever-​increasing short-​, medium-​ and long-​term negative impact of the pandemic on women and girls. We argue that

44

Gender, Development and COVID-19

a feminist political economy approach can better understand the complexity of women and girls’ lived disadvantage. Taking this approach would form the basis of feminist recovery plans from COVID-​19, based on profound change to the structure of contemporary societies. These should form part of the templates for recovery and the frameworks with which we hold governments to account in a post-​pandemic world.

45

TWO

Unequal Development: What Lies Beneath COVID-​19’s Gender Politics?

Introduction COVID-​19 is not the great leveller, as was initially claimed (Ali et al, 2020). Quite the reverse, in fact: both the disease and the measures imposed or recommended by governments to contain its impact disproportionately fell upon the poor and most vulnerable. Vulnerability is an outcome of multiple forms of structural and social discrimination that compound poverty and discrimination across the world, and which is often felt most strongly in the Global South. For example, those living in poverty are vulnerable during the COVID-​19 pandemic because they are the least likely to have health insurance, secure employment, savings and spacious homes; those living in countries where health systems are weak or perilously underfunded are the most grievously affected (Stiglitz, 2020). Vulnerability cannot be solely measured by income, whether individual or state-​level. The geography and geopolitics of COVID-​19 shape people’s everyday lived experiences of the pandemic (Dodds et al, 2020). Those who live in rural or poor areas are further away from hospitals, especially good quality ones, and other health and social services. Additionally, people’s intersectional characteristics, such as their race or ethnicity, age, (dis)ability and sexuality, as well as gender, leave them open to discrimination that shape their economic and social opportunities. The more axes of discrimination a

46

Unequal Development

person experiences, the more disproportionately affected they are by COVID-​19. Women and girls marginalized through gender, race, ethnicity, socio-​economic status, place of origin, education, employment and culture tend to fare the worst. To understand the unequal distribution of risks associated with COVID-​19, in particular the excessive and unnecessary risks COVID-​19 poses to poor women and girls in the Global South, we need to understand not only the politics of gender and development as set out in Chapter One, but also the operation of the global political economy. We turn to this now to explain how women are made vulnerable through the ways they are integrated into and excluded from the global political economy. The point we wish to make, above all, is that the global political economy is not gender-​neutral. We show how the rules governing global finance actively worsen health, income and employment security for the poor, and especially poor women, and especially those located geographically in, or from, the Global South. We conclude that any hope of an equitable recovery from the pandemic is dependent on urgent reforms, that include ending austerity budgets and creating expansive global finance schemes that repair the damage done to women’s health and their socio-​economic wellbeing. Gendered vulnerabilities and the global political economy Long before the pandemic struck, women in the Global South faced gendered development challenges that impeded their access to decent work, welfare and dignified healthcare (Riggirozzi, 2020a). Women experience multiple structural discrimination in formal labour markets. They are excluded from many prestigious occupations, and work longer hours than men (UN Women, ndc; United Nations, nd). In contrast, they are overrepresented in the informal sector, occupy lower paid positions than men, and frequently lack social security protections. Welfare policies aimed at women view them not as citizen-​subjects but as carers for the next generation

47

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

(Molyneux, 2006). The SDGs acknowledge the impact of systematic gender discrimination within labour markets as a barrier to sustainable development. For example, Goal 5 commits states to create policies that promote gender equality, including in care and domestic work (5.4); Goal 8 on decent work includes directly addressing the need for policies to achieve full and productive employment for all women as well as men, and equal pay for work of equal value regardless of gender (8.5) (UNDESA, 2020a). The global political economies of violence, sex and health disadvantage women still further, especially poor, migrant, Black, Indigenous and women of colour. Although gender-​ based violence affects all women and girls, those from the most impoverished or marginalized communities are less likely to have the resources to escape and rebuild from cycles of violence. The global sex industry harms and exploits girls and women from the poorest communities in the Global South, for the benefit of individual men and male-​dominated systems (Jeffreys, 2008). During 2020, the trafficking of women in just one state in Mexico rose by over 250 per cent (PorEsto!, 2020). Pornography is a major part of this global industry and in 2020, sexual abuse and exploitation of children in online spaces rose at alarming rates (Interpol, 2020), as did ‘revenge porn’ (V, 2021). The poorest and most marginalized women and girls also lose out in the global health economy. In countries and localities where health systems are chronically underfunded, women and girls traditionally provide informal care. Maternal health and sexual and reproductive health services are low priority for public spending, and in some cases, conservative social groups are able to block their provision. During the pandemic, girls’ and women’s access to these services diminished substantially. The gendered global consequences of COVID-​19 have been exceptionally severe because the virus sparked an extraordinary health crisis ‘superimposed’ upon an already severe gendered crisis (UNDP, 2020d: 5). The discovery of the COVID-​19 virus in late 2019 represented not only the beginning of

48

Unequal Development

a global health pandemic, but also the intensification of a gendered, global macroeconomic and social crisis. These economic and social crises will shape the next decade of global development, and present obstacles to wellbeing and human security greater than the health challenge of COVID-​19, especially for regions and countries with fragile economies, high levels of dependence on global financial institutions, and limited financial capacity. COVID-​19, like every pandemic, has unevenly reduced income and spending, revealed the limitations of state capacity and caused the dismantling of many of the collective institutions that, however ineffective or partial in practice, seek to provide some security to individuals, especially the most vulnerable (UNDP, 2020d). In many cases, the most vulnerable are women and girls. COVID-​19 and the inequalities of access to finance Fiscal expenditure is essential for planning, stimulating and investing in recovery from COVID-​19. Finance is at the heart of government capacity to manage health crises and deliver sustainable development for all citizens. Of course, income into the state does not mean that governments will deliver effective and equitable policies; but without fiscal resources, governments will most certainly fail to protect and promote the wellbeing of their citizens. When health crises occur, the capacity to enact rapid fiscal stimulus programmes is an essential tool that can protect lives and livelihoods and, at the same time, ensure that doing so is not at the expense of the existing social and economic programmes upon which people depend (Steel and Harris, 2020). In general, responses to health emergencies and other major fiscal crises are rolled out in two phases: there is a fiscal expansion phase, involving a series of stimulus packages to enable a public health response and maintain economic activity, followed by a fiscal contraction phase, characterized by a reduction in public spending, servicing of any debt incurred

49

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

during the expansive period and, often, austerity (Oxfam, 2020a). Governments frequently borrow in order to spend in the first phase, taking on significant debt burdens that can affect growth and development for many years after the crisis is over. At the same time, how generously governments can spend in the first phase, and how far they can soften the costs of the second, depends, in part, on the resources they are able to access and deploy as well as their ideas, priorities and interests. Governments might seek to defend the interests of the wealthy and the private sector in order to try and promote growth or, alternatively, seek to regulate the private sector in order to compensate those who sustain the greatest losses. Whatever they aim to do is motivated by ideas and interests within government; but, crucially, access to financial resources, and the terms of that access, depends on national positioning in the hierarchy of global development. Responding to the pandemic has been expensive and inequitable access to finance is at the root of how, and how effectively, governments have managed COVID-​19. In so-​ called developed countries, initial responses to the virus and rapidly rising cases led to national lockdowns, first in China, followed by Europe, New Zealand and Australia, the US and Canada. These were extremely costly for three main reasons. First, the cessation of near entire economic output initiated through social distancing and ‘stay at home’ policies meant an immediate reduction in economic activity and the loss of jobs and income, such that the ILO initially estimated the number of new unemployed could reach 25 million globally (ILO, 2020a).1 Second, the cost of meeting this health challenge increased fiscal pressure for economies through augmented healthcare costs associated with the pandemic itself. The construction of temporary hospital facilities, the (re-​)recruitment of former healthcare professionals, procurement of private healthcare provider services and the additional requirements of PPE all led to a marked increase in direct healthcare spending which in the UK alone was estimated to be £48.3 billion (2020/​2021)

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Unequal Development

by the Health Foundation’s Spending Review (Thorlby et al, 2020). Third, governments were forced to implement extensive interventionist economic measures on a scale unseen during peace times. Wide-​ranging social redistribution policies were targeted towards protecting citizens’ jobs while providing an enhanced level of welfare support (required, of course, due to economic closures). This in turn pushed developed countries’ borrowing up to levels not seen since the Second World War. Developed countries paid for the initial phase of their pandemic response largely through borrowing. Accessing finance through external debt did not present a challenge for developed countries, since they have access to cheap borrowing and record-​low interest rates. In the US, the size of the economic recovery package implemented by the Trump administration exceeded US$2 trillion, funded chiefly by external debt, which reached US$27.05 trillion by November 2020. With GDP at that time forecasted to be US$19.5 trillion, this meant a debt-​to-​GDP ratio of 122 per cent (Federal Reserve, 2020; Lu, 2020). The US was not alone in debt exceeding GDP in this expansionary phase of pandemic response. Germany’s parliament, traditionally committed to fiscal conservatism, increased borrowing by €217.8 billion and pushed the debt-​to-​GDP ratio up from 62 to 76 per cent (DW, 2020; Gramlich, 2020; IMF, 2021a). In the UK, net government borrowing for the financial year April 2020–​March 2021 reached £304 billion, representing the highest level of borrowing since records began in 1993. The UK debt-​to-​GDP ratio was 106 per cent by March 2021; this scale of borrowing meant that the gross debt surpassed economic output and reached £2,224.5 billion (Office for National Statistics, 2021). These figures from countries in the Global North give a sense of the fiscal challenge COVID-​19 poses. Inevitably, countries in the Global South could not respond in the same way and on the same scale (Glassman et al, 2020). The resulting differences in access to funding have both highlighted global inequalities

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

and exacerbated them. Major funding gaps have opened up for developing countries not only in terms of health service capacity, or ability to compete in the expanding vaccine market, but also in terms of policies to protect livelihoods, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable (Shadmi et al, 2020). These gaps derive from multiple issues: currencies are weaker across the Global South (Steel and Harris, 2020), access to new sources of liquidity is more limited and subject to conditionality, central banks do not have the same capacities, and investors are less willing to buy their debt (Gates Foundation, 2020; OECD, 2020a). Furthermore, the economies of low-​and middle-​income countries are more vulnerable because they are trade-​dependent. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the fall in exports from developing to developed countries as the latter went into recession was between 13 per cent and 32 per cent in volume in 2020 (ECLAC, 2020b). Added to this, commodity prices, on which many developing countries depend, fell due to the collapse in trade (UNCTAD, 2020), while the closure of national borders has decimated tourism sectors –​again, an important source of income for many developing countries. For this reason, the World Bank (2020a) argued right at the beginning of the pandemic that ‘the economic downturn will be broader, much deeper and will hit developing regions harder especially informal sector workers, the poor and women and children’. The scale of the challenge that COVID-​19 presents for developing nations and the level of financial package that these countries were able to access in response is laid bare in Table 2.1. Here disparities between GDP ratio responses by sub-​Saharan African countries are presented alongside those in the G20. Furthermore, this table highlights the disparities that already existed between these countries in terms of GDP per capita. When these figures are taken together, they translate into a smaller response in a much smaller output: in other words, a smaller piece of a smaller cake (Gates Foundation, 2020). Disparities in these GDP response figures highlight the

52

newgenrtpdf

Table 2.1: Pandemic response ratio to GDP G20* Brazil

Canada

China

France

Germany

% of GDP

2.9

13.3

27.2

47.8

11.9

20.2

33.8

GDP per capita, US$

11,684

57,374

8,925

46,233

9,771

41,464

47,603

India

Indonesia

Italy

Japan

Korea (Rep)

Mexico

Russia

% of GDP

10.3

8.5

48.9

68.9

16

4.8

7.2

GDP per capita, US$

2,010

3,894

34,483

39,290

31,364

9,673

11,473

Saudi Arabia

South Africa

Turkey

UK

US

% of GDP

8.9

12

9.7

44.6

29.6

GDP per capita US$

23,339

6,374

9,370

42,944

62,795

Botswana

Ethiopia

Kenya

Nigeria

Somalia

South Sudan

Uganda

% of GDP

1.8

3.1

1.0

4.5

0.3

0.1

0.3

GDP per capita US$

8,259

772

1,711

2,028

315

748

648

Sub-​Saharan Africa

Source: ODI data cited in Gates Foundation (2020). Note: * The EU represents the 20th member of the G20.

Unequal Development

Australia

53

Argentina

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

existence of inequalities in global financing streams, showing why wealthier countries have been able to respond much more robustly than low-​and middle-​income countries. The global economy: debt is burdening the most vulnerable during COVID-​19 Recommended responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic have been broadly the same across the world, characterized above all by national lockdowns and the shutdown of economic activity. Those countries that resisted lockdown, such as India and Brazil, have generally paid the highest price in terms of deaths (Nature, 2021). However, whether countries can sustain lockdown measures and their socio-​economic impact varies in accordance with resources and policies and is, therefore, vastly different. As such, the impacts of these policies will be different, both on citizens and on governments, according to global geography and individual, familial and community resources. Geographically, the cessation of major economic activity has been felt more acutely in low-​and middle-​income countries. These are also the countries with a significant ‘capacity gap’ in health systems, causing the WHO to voice concerns almost at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 that the Global South would not be able to respond adequately to the pandemic (WHO, 2020a). These problems impact most severely on the poorest who have the least resources to respond to the challenges. Many of the most impoverished people in Latin America and sub-​ Saharan Africa –​in many cases, women and girls –​especially those working in the informal sector, operate in the day-​by-​day economy. This was highlighted in an interview with an official of the African Union, who explained that, often, “people work that day to eat that day” (anonymized interview, African Union, 10 August 2020). Even many people in the middle classes of the Global South in formal sector employment have low levels of savings, sometimes in unstable currencies. Social welfare

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Unequal Development

systems and safety nets are limited in scope, level and duration and employers are less effectively regulated and therefore less likely to be made to provide appropriate compensation or labour conditions for their workers (UNDESA, 2021). In the face of COVID-​19, many governments in the Global South have responded with emergency welfare spending, income support, cash transfer programmes, tax-​cuts and deferrals, rent and utility reductions and freezes –​but at a lower rate than in developed countries and for a limited period of time (ECLAC, 2020c). There is evidence that corporations, meanwhile, have ‘committed labour rights abuses, such as unjustified dismissals, reduction of salaries, forced leave without pay and even reprisals against workers who demanded the protection of their rights’ during the pandemic (BHRRC, 2020: 19). As in the Global North, countries in the Global South sought to finance pandemic response measures through borrowing. But accessing loans is much harder and more expensive for Global South countries. As a result, they have tended to incur additional debt with multilateral lending agencies the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF initially signaled willingness to lend, with the Director recognizing that the COVID-​19 pandemic is ‘a challenge like no other, therefore, it requires a response like no other’ (Georgieva, 2020). The IMF secured lending capacity up to US$1 trillion for its members through varying finance mechanisms, with the lion’s share of these measures offered to Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa (IMF, 2021b). By March 2020, the World Bank had committed to US$160 billion in additional funding to help finance health, economic and social shocks in low-​and middle-​income countries. But this was downgraded in October 2020 to US$104 billion, provoking considerable criticism that the World Bank’s response was too small and too slow (Duggan et al, 2020). And indeed the same criticism applied to the IMF: despite claiming to prioritize Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, it was providing far less than what was required, and, additionally, was offered new loans or relief on current debt (Stubbs et al, 2021). In

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effect, countries in the Global South were being forced to accept additional loans or moratoria on current liabilities to manage the pandemic in ways that would entrench and deepen inequalities. In May 2020, both the need for developing countries to increase fiscal space to respond to COVID-​19, and an acknowledgement that debt levels were already reaching unserviceable levels, led the IMF and the World Bank to call for temporary suspensions of debt repayments. The creation of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) was endorsed by some of the leading lenders including the G20, G7 and the Paris Club of creditors.2 The World Bank estimated that 43 countries had taken advantage of this initiative, which has equated to around US$5 billion of debt suspension. On paper, this sounds impressive, but in practice, it barely scratches the surface of need, and is insufficient to enable governments to provide relief and protection through the immediate two-​year crisis that COVID-​19 has produced, without even considering longer-​term recovery. By November 2020, only 1.66 per cent of debt relief payments for developing countries had been covered by the DSSI (Fresnillo, 2020). There are many problems with the DSSI which limit its impact and, in some cases, make the economic crisis worse for the poorest. Effectively, it treats COVID-​19 as a short shock to the economic order rather than a major disruption with highly unequal consequences. So, the short-​term nature of the DSSI means it is not sufficient to really help struggling countries (Fresnillo, 2020). Originally, this relief was only in place until the end of 2020, with the World Bank and the IMF lobbying the G20 to extend this period through until the end of 2021. While at the time of writing, this has been extended to December 2021, there still remains a lack of planning for long-​term recovery (World Bank, 2021). Furthermore, not all creditors agreed to the terms of the moratoria, with some private funders and public creditors refusing to do so. What this means is that not all developing country debt is actually

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subject to the promised ‘repayment holiday’, creating in effect additional financial pressure on already indebted countries, struggling to contain and manage both COVID-​19 and the economic fallout from it. In the end, it is the absence of planning for the future that will bear most in terms of long-​ term development costs. Existing relief packages offer, at best, deferrals for debt repayment, and low-​and middle-​income countries continue to incur new debt (Munevar, 2020a).3 In reality, emergency funding to manage the pandemic has instead been redeployed against for existing debt payments. By mid-​July 2020, it was estimated that US$11.3 billion of IMF aid earmarked for pandemic response has been redirected to debt servicing by 28 countries across the Global South (Inman, 2020). In contrast, funding lines for low-​and middle-​income countries to deal with the impacts of COVID-​19 that are not lending-​based have been scarce. Grant-​based finance has been minimal. The IMF’s US$500 million Catastrophe Containment Relief Fund (CCRF) has been made available to 25 low-​ income countries globally for debt relief, 18 of which are in sub-​Saharan Africa.4 Aid agencies in May 2020 were arguing that donor grants were too small, and too slow to make the impact that was required to meet the financial challenges of the pandemic (Smith and Chadwick, 2020). Indebtedness pre-​2020 was already rising in many Latin American countries because of poor economic performance and failing external revenues. In mid-​2020, the Inter-​American Development Bank forecast that regional debt would rise from 57 per cent in 2019, to 78 per cent by 2021 (Powell and Valencia, 2020). Argentina, for example, had defaulted on its international debt before the pandemic, with a debt-​to-​GDP ratio of 89 per cent, leading to ongoing tense discussions with international creditors at the start of the pandemic (Peña and Barlow, 2020). Brazil’s debt-​to-​GDP ratio stood at 79 per cent, and it debt burden increased dramatically through 2020 (McGeever, 2020). The OECD predicted that Latin

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

America as a whole would be the region most detrimentally impacted by COVID-​19, both epidemiologically –​ the epicentre of the virus was centred over Latin America in July and August 2020 (Zimmermann, 2020) –​and economically. Low levels of growth, weak health systems, low and narrow tax bases, overreliance on commodity exports and over-​ borrowing presented barriers for governments to meet the health challenges of the COVID-​19 pandemic (Davies, 2020; OECD, 2020b). While the fears about the impact of debt curtailing pandemic responses have been largely borne out, Latin America was not an isolated region in terms of experiencing massive economic costs. Sub-​Saharan Africa was also struggling under the burden of debt prior to the pandemic (Coulibaly, 2021). Debt cripples the poorest countries and has a direct impact on health, welfare and other public spending. In 2018, 46 low-​ income countries –​most of which are in sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America –​were spending more on debt servicing than on healthcare (Munevar, 2020b). The disparities in health spending are stark. Annually, sub-​Saharan African countries were spending an average of US$70 per capita on healthcare (supplemented with US$10 external assistance): this is in contrast to US$442 in China and an average of US$3,040 in the EU (Miller et al, 2020). Countries that were already managing large debt burdens pre-​pandemic, and that in turn have seen their debt increase during the pandemic, were much less prepared to deal with the health and social impacts of the pandemic when COVID-​19 hit and have not been able to find a stable footing to respond to the pandemic in ways which truly support the most vulnerable citizens. In sub-​Saharan Africa, low and narrow tax bases have historically meant that governments needed to raise revenues from other sources. The ‘heavy lifting’ of this financing has fallen on the shoulders of borrowing and donor aid, both of which have represented alternative financing frameworks for governments to fund state obligations in lieu of tax receipts

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(Moore, 2020). By mid-​April 2020, average African debt-​to-​ GDP was below the 60 per cent (danger) threshold, which is way below the crisis levels of the 1980s and 1990s. However, the cost of debt has exponentially increased due to low credit ratings translating into poor interest rates (Mutize, 2020). Two years prior to this, 18 sub-​Saharan African countries were already at high risk of debt distress and austerity cuts to public services were implemented to service debt obligations (Mustapha and Prizzon, 2018, 2020). The debt burden is not gender-​neutral High level of indebtedness has consistently impacted on development in low-​ and middle-​income countries (Soederberg, 2013). It is not surprising, then, that debt is impeding developing countries being able to meet the immense challenges presented by COVID-​19. Debt has served to mediate the tensions created by market-​based development and the associated social and economic costs in the Global South because it has enabled governments to provide safety-​net and targeted welfare (Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2009). But it has not enabled sustained investment in state provision of public services, including in health services. Political and economic systems across much of the Global South are characterized by limited welfare, low quality and limited public health systems, and low paid employment, in combination with public and private debt: in the context of the pandemic, these systems are now strained to their limits. The social costs of debt are growing while the institutional capacity of low-​and middle-​ income states to provide care is diminishing. Publicly funded health systems across the Global South have been underfunded for many years, which affects all members of societies. But there are specific gendered challenges, over the long term and during health crises, that affect men and women differently. These are exacerbated by institutionalized male bias in policy-​making (Elson, 1995). During the pandemic,

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they came together early to create a range of unprecedented risks for poor and vulnerable women and girls. Initially, the medical view on COVID-​19 was that, from an epidemiological perspective, men may be more at risk than women if they contracted COVID-​19. But it quickly became evident that, simultaneously, the risks for women in other areas of health would be acute. Evidence from previous health crises such as Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Latin America showed that women were at very considerable risk from decisions that men in positions of power would take in times of health crisis. In West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, governments took the decision to deprioritize and defund women’s health services, leaving women –​ especially pregnant women –​ without structural support, while at the same time threats to their health and the health of their unborn children increased (UNDP, 2014; Walker et al, 2015). The suspension of reproductive health services during the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone meant that while, devastatingly, 3,589 people succumbed to the Ebola virus, approximately 3,593 to 4,936 new mothers and babies died during childbirth (Gates, 2020). Meanwhile, in Latin America and the Caribbean, governments failed to respond adequately to an outbreak of the Zika virus in 2016, a disease which poses a major health risk to pregnant women and their babies. A lack of concern about women’s reproductive health, especially that of poor women, meant that governments did not provide the funding and resources to reach the women who were at greatest risk.5 During the epidemic, the poorest women in urban locations and Indigenous women in rural locations had limited or no access to contraception or abortion services (Davies and Bennett, 2016). Instead, governments shifted responsibility onto the shoulders of individual women who were urged to avoid pregnancies, without being supported with the means to do so. Similarly, early financing initiatives to combat the COVID-​ 19 pandemic did not respond sufficiently to the gendered socio-​economic challenges of the pandemic, even though

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it was widely acknowledged that girls and women would be disproportionately negatively affected in socio-​economic aspects. In the early stages of the pandemic, fiscal expansionary policies were widely implemented as a mechanism to try and support the most vulnerable citizens through periods of self-​imposed economic inactivity, while simultaneously acting as a tool to try to stimulate recoveries, post-​crisis. Wide-​ranging heterodox policies that in some cases have seen the most conservative of governments intervening into economies on levels not seen in peacetime have become the norm for countries that have the capacity to implement them. In Latin America, emergency fiscal expansionary policies were implemented to achieve two goals: first, to increase healthcare capacity by shifting state resources towards pandemic response; and, second, to try and ameliorate the financial position of some of the most vulnerable in society. Social policies that included tax deferral schemes for households and small businesses, programmes of subsidies, direct cash transfers and guarantees from utility companies that customers in arrears would not have services disconnected during the pandemic, formed part of the raft of emergency packages (ECLAC, 2020a). However, although the World Bank and the IMF recognized women’s particular vulnerability as a result of the economic shutdowns, governments failed to respond adequately, and policies directly targeted at women have been lacking. Table 2.2 indicates an inconsistent and patchy gendered response in Latin America and while the table shows that there were a significant number of heterodox economic policies implemented across the region through debt relief and fiscal stimulus, initial policies targeted towards women did not meet the scale of the need on the ground. The response has also varied considerably across the region, with Mexico having the most gendered economic policies, and Ecuador, none (ECLAC, 2020a). Furthermore, by mid-​2021, when additional policies were implemented to drive recovery, only two of these additional policies were targeted at women and girls (ECLAC, 2020a).

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Table 2.2: Latin American economic and gendered economic responses Number of economic responses*

Number of gendered benefits and cash transfers*

Number of gendered employment and income policies*

Number of gendered economic responses (%)**

Argentina

95

5

4

9

Brazil

88

1

1

2

Bolivia

29

1

–​

3

Chile

61

3

7‌

16

Colombia

87

1

4

6

Ecuador

16

–​

–​

0

Mexico

28

3

5

29

Paraguay

26

1

1

8

Peru

41

1

1

5

Uruguay

34

2‌

–‌

6‌

Venezuela

14

1

1‌

14

Source: ECLAC (2020d). Notes: * Figures are correct as of 25th January 2022. ** Authors’ own percentage calculations.

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

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Unequal Development

This situation is not confined to Latin America. A UNDP assessment of gender in COVID-​19 responses in sub-​Saharan Africa highlighted that only 16 per cent of social protection and labour market measures adopted by 45 countries in Africa were gender sensitive through their focus on women’s economic empowerment and unpaid care (UNDP, 2020a). According to the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor, between March and October 2020, a raft of policies had been implemented throughout the regions both through additional spending and through foregone revenue policies via tax cuts for the lowest paid workers. More explicitly, some of the wide-​ranging policies that were implemented included the redistribution of cash and physical food supplies, including social protections through cash and food transfers, emergency shelter and non-​food items, subsidies for utility payments, investment into farm inputs and improving market access for farmers to maintain the distribution of food (IMF, 2020b). However, what is evident throughout this fiscal policy tracker is that women do not feature prominently in these fiscal policy responses. There is a complete lack of gender-​targeted fiscal stimulus packages which the African Development Bank (AfDB) argues could be implemented through gender budgeting ‘with every disbursement done with a gender lens to address the effects of the pandemic on women’ (Chuku et al, 2020). All of this highlights the gap that exists between understanding how women are made vulnerable through policy responses in times of crisis, and the importance of implementing policies that address these vulnerabilities. At the global level, the response has not been much better. The IMF has offered at best contradictory, and at worst damaging, advice and terms that exacerbates inequalities (Oxfam, 2020b). It recognizes that there are gendered challenges during the crisis. There is a focus mainly on women’s work and a recognition that women working in the informal sector need more support, and emphasizing women’s greater burden of unpaid care work. Yet, despite recognizing gendered issues on the one hand, the IMF simultaneously advocates for

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policies that disadvantage women (interview, Fresnillo, Policy and Advocacy Manager at Eurodad, 4 August 2020). For example, the social security systems that the IMF advocates undermines women working in the informal sector, as these systems –​on the whole –​do not recognize work that does not formally make social security contributions, so by extension, informal workers have no safety net. In short, they are invisible to these systems and therefore are not protected by them. This is problematic when so many women earn a living through informal work throughout the Global South. Furthermore, the IMF also called for the suspension of energy subsidies in some regions because of the growing debt problem. Given the concentration of all activities into the home, and women’s presumed responsibility in caring for the household and its inhabitants, this recommendation would only increase the socio-​economic tensions already felt more profoundly by women. No subsidies means less or no energy –​energy relied upon for access to the internet to attend homeschool classes, for gadgets for entertainment and relaxation, and for items that ease housework like washing machines or microwaves. This example lays bare the tension that exists between acknowledging that policies are required to address the gendered inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic but balancing this in the context of growing national debt (Oxfam, 2020b). This empirical example reflects what feminist authors working in political economy have conceptually argued for a long time, that there are gendered injustices and inequalities in the global financial system (Griffin, 2015) that are especially laid bare when there are global financial crises (Fukuda-​Parr et al, 2013). In times of financial crisis, women tend to fare worse than men. This is also true during periods of austerity which often follow financial crises. As Allon (2014) argues, this is because during austerity phases, states have historically shifted the burden and risk onto the so-​called ‘private sphere’ of households, which as we have argued, disproportionately increases pressure for women.

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In sum, all the signs were there early on in the COVID-​19 pandemic that austerity would follow the increased spending of the initial economic response (Oxfam, 2020b). Although at first emergency IMF loans did not come with conditionalities, they did offer recommendations –​such as the suspension of energy subsidies (interview, Fresnillo, 4 August 2020) –​which provided an insight into the austerity that may follow. This was further highlighted by the IMF in June 2020, when Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva made the following statement: ‘this is the time to do all it takes to support those most affected by the crisis. So please spend whatever is needed but spend wisely and keep your receipts –​both to return eventually to a sustainable fiscal position and to ensure the accountability of pandemic-​related expenditures’ (IMF, 2020c, emphasis in the original). This clearly implies that whatever was borrowed would need to be accounted for and paid back. This requirement to pay loans back in turn suggests that austerity is almost inevitable, as states will need to make savings in other areas in order to pay their loans back. This is doubly problematic for women and girls: what was being borrowed by governments in the first place was not meeting the needs of many women and girls, and on top of this, austerity measures are also gendered, and tend to impact more negatively on women and girls (Oxfam, 2020b). The increase in support for pandemic response is therefore problematic for countries already struggling, because as history has shown us time and time again, the expansionary phase will lead to a period of fiscal contraction, and this pandemic appears to be no different in this respect. We can now see that the shadow of austerity is getting closer for countries already struggling under existing debt burdens, but which require new or expanded IMF bailouts to weather the COVID-​19 storm. Oxfam have highlighted that policy recommendations by the IMF to the governments of Angola, Barbados, Ecuador, El Salvador, Lesotho and Nigeria highlight this looming austerity. Governments have been advised by the IMF to increase VAT, reduce public sector wages and

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THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

abolish subsidies (Oxfam, 2020b). In short, they are conditions targeted at reducing state expenditure from state-​owned companies. This is the same narrative aimed at shrinking the state, and again, women have not been protected in these recommendations (interview, Fresnillo, 4 August 2020). This suggests that rather than a plan to build back better, what we have seen only appears to offer a deeper debt crisis and more of the same gendered inequalities. Of course, this will threaten the aspirations of achieving gender inequality and the SDGs roadmap. COVID-​19’s development impact: gender and the wider Sustainable Development Goals The Covid-​19 pandemic has pushed back 25 years of development in 25 weeks. (Gates Foundation, 2020) The SDGs were set out in 2015; not so long ago in terms of time, but undoubtedly, in many ways, another era. Even before the onset of COVID-​19, however, Horn and Grugel (2018) suggested that underfunded, liberal global goal-​setting sat uneasily in a global architecture in which power was rapidly shifting away from the West towards China, thereby creating the possibility of uneven and partial engagement with SDG goals and targets in low-​and middle-​income countries, according to national priorities. These existing tensions within the global development project have been profoundly exacerbated by the COVID-​19 crisis. The pandemic and the social, economic and political costs associated with economic recession and lockdowns have the capacity to reverse the limited progress –​mainly in relation to reducing extreme poverty and hunger –​made towards the ambitious goals of ending poverty, fighting inequality and combating climate change. In relation to the specific SDG goals, progress targeted at poverty eradication, gender equality,

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health, education and food security have fared particularly badly. Since the start of the pandemic, the socio-​economic impact across developing regions has been significant. Published in late 2020, the Gates Foundation’s 2020 Goalkeeper Report (Gates Foundation, 2020) highlights the extent of this. Extreme poverty increased by 7 per cent between March 2020 and September 2020, breaking a 20-​year trend of progress in this area. In the same months, the pandemic had pushed almost 37 million people below the US$1.90 a day extreme poverty threshold, while an additional 68 million people in lower-​and middle-​income countries had slipped below the US$3.20 per day poverty line (Gates Foundation, 2020). Lockdowns have created barriers for workers in gaining access to agricultural land, trade routes have been closed along with markets, and unemployment has increased, all of which affect hunger. By the end of 2020, it was estimated that ‘economic shocks will plunge between 83 and 132 million people into food insecurity’ (Gates, 2020: 26). This basically means that progress towards zero hunger (SDG 2) came under threat. This reversal of decades of progress, at least in terms of reducing hunger and indigence, will be difficult to get back on track, since the global economy has lost US$12 trillion dollars from its pre-​pandemic level. This degree of economic contraction has meant a reduction in the global labour market to such an extent that, in the second quarter of 2020 alone, the equivalent of 400 million jobs were estimated to have been lost because of the pandemic and pandemic response (United Nations, 2020b). What all of this brings home is the poverty of global responses: from a global equity perspective, short-​term emergency funding packages from multilateral and bilateral funders are insufficient now and will continue to be so. From a gender perspective, women’s wellbeing has been undermined by governments’ refusal to consider the gender impact of its pandemic financial and economic policies and borrowing strategies. Furthermore, the ‘stay at home’ messages have meant that already disadvantaged girls have

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seen additional barriers to their education. Globally, nine out of ten children were in lockdown at the height of the first peak of the pandemic (UNESCO, 2021). Without addressing barriers to girls’ education –​which we explore in greater detail in Chapter Five –​the future economic prospects for women and girls (as well as their potential contribution to national wellbeing) go unaddressed. Building back better inclusively It is not inevitable that women and girls suffer disproportionately negatively during economic crises, nor that they pay a disproportionate price in policies that are supposed to alleviate crises. Why, then, in practice, does this happen, even though policy makers explicitly recognize –​discursively at least -​the importance of addressing gendered inequality into policy? Addressing the gendered inequalities and challenges to inclusion that we have highlighted in this chapter are essential to both building out of the COVID-​19 pandemic, and in trying to address wider development challenges. Inequality presents a serious threat to social and political stability, and it presents economic challenges to sustained growth. By addressing gender inequality, economic recovery would be stronger. The IMF, by no means a gender radical organization, has highlighted that historically, greater equality of income has actually increased the duration of periods of economic growth, more so than factors including free trade, low government corruption or a low level of foreign debt (Ostry and Berg, 2011). There is a growing understanding that addressing inequality is, consequently, of fundamental importance, as higher levels of inequality are linked to economic crises (Bordo and Meissner, 2012). Therefore, by late 2020, with international focus shifting one eye towards the pandemic recovery phase, multilateral institutions, development banks and international agencies were arguing that the pandemic should become an opportunity to address some of the previous inequalities that the SDGs were

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created to address; to use this moment to ‘build back better’ (Shamasunder et al, 2020). The AfDB expanded this rhetoric by arguing that countries should not return to normal following the pandemic but should aspire to something better: Back to better, not normal. However, early signs of addressing inequalities including gendered inequalities through recovery programmes are not looking promising. In late 2020, the Gates Foundation pointed to the fact that the cutbacks in maternal care during the current pandemic could claim the lives of up to 113,000 women, and funding post-​pandemic is unlikely to be available to address this (Gates, 2020). Funding shortfalls have already been seen within current responses where donor organizations including the European Union (EU) are working with NGOs to reallocate existing development funds, including in areas like education, towards COVID-​19 response (European Commission, 2020a). NGOs emphasize that available finance is inadequate in addressing the scale of the problem and women’s services will suffer (Bond, 2020). Very few international NGOs that are supporting sub-​Saharan African countries are receiving new financial support from international donors, even though the region is recognized as one of the critical areas that requires support to respond to COVID-​19. With less aid, debt will again become the primary option to fund pandemic response, in already highly indebted countries. The scale of this was seen early on in the pandemic in sub-​Saharan Africa when, by May 2020, African finance ministers had already requested US$100 billion in debt to finance COVID-​19 response (Miller et al, 2020). This debt crisis will exacerbate fiscal problems which are already causing developing countries to underfund health systems, leaving vulnerable groups in society even more vulnerable. Funding instruments that prioritize debt do little to support the least developed countries, especially those in sub-​Saharan Africa, to achieve long-​term COVID-​19 recovery –​ especially highly indebted countries that require grants, as

69

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

opposed to further loans (Miller et al, 2020). The limited grant-​ based funding for COVID-​19 responses means that across the Global South, the development funding deficit will persist, and compromise pandemic recoveries, which, as we have argued, will put women and girls at heightened risks throughout all stages of pandemic response and recovery. Conclusion In addition to health challenges, the COVID-​19 pandemic has presented major socio-​economic challenges. As with health, socio-​economic challenges are not experienced in the same way by all. Some countries entered the pandemic in a more disadvantaged point than others, and so did some citizens: women and girls in the Global South, most especially those living in poverty or on low incomes, have always been among the most excluded and unprotected by mainstream national development policies; this remained the case in repsonses to COVID-​19. Cross-​national responses to the virus have generally followed similar patterns, through the implementation of social distancing measures and economic contraction. However, countries’ financial capacity to deal with the ramifications of these policies has been starkly different. Developed countries have turned to external borrowing, in some cases exceeding total national output to levels not seen since the 1940s, to finance interventionalist policies that are implemented to cushion citizens and economies to weather the COVID-​19 storm. While so-​called developing countries have followed the same policies, they do not have the financial capacity to respond to the challenges in the same way, primarily because of a lower level of GDP output and because of the level of indebtedness that is representative of many developing countries. Furthermore, with weaker currencies, the option to borrow more on favourable terms is generally not there for developing countries. There has been some minimal

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grant-​based funding options to finance pandemic responses in developing countries, but the overwhelming pathway for financing COVID-​19 responses is through debt moratoriums, followed by taking on more debt. This only delays the onset of debt management problems, and inevitably the most vulnerable in society –​of which women and girls living in poverty are included –​will shoulder a greater burden in the financial stabilization programmes that follow. Policies that have been implemented so far simply do not sufficiently recognize this reality or alleviate the situations for the most vulnerable; indeed in some cases, policies effectively exacerbate vulnerability. Our analysis highlights how some states in the Global South have faced a range of difficulties in making an effective response to COVID-​19 and to the economic crisis that will almost certainly follow for them. In many countries, governments are already struggling to maintain spending on some programmes that are essential to women’s health and wellbeing, including reproductive health programmes. Those countries that were already indebted before the pandemic, in both sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America, face heightened challenges that risk exacerbating gendered inequalities and increasing gendered vulnerabilities. However, with increasing debt levels, no additional grant-​based funding on the horizon, and funding for women’s health services diverted towards pandemic response, the burden on women will only increase. This risks exacerbating inequalities further and pushing back the limited and fragile progress made thus far towards gender equality.

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THREE

Regional Governance: A Missed Opportunity to Tackle COVID-​19’s Gendered Inequalities?

Introduction A broad range of region-​wide organizations exist in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, some of which have a specifically health-​related remit, such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) or the West African Health Organization (WAHO) and the East, Central and South Africa Health Community (ECSA). Others focus on trade and development such as the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) and the Andean Community in Latin America, and the Regional Economic Communities (REC) in sub-​S aharan Africa which include the East African Community (EAC), Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Other organizations have come into existence to promote regional autonomy and political cooperation, such as the African Union, or share knowledge and expertise, such as ECLAC. Despite their differences –​ and the challenges in maintaining unified approaches in regions that are characterized as much by difference as similarity –​these organizations have become increasingly important, especially since the 1990s. They now aspire to act as a channel downwards into states and try to shape government policy through expert technical knowledge, and to enable regional states to talk collectively to international

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organizations, including UN bodies and international health and development organizations such as the WHO. In some cases, especially in sub-​Saharan Africa, regional organizations also have acquired the authority to dialogue directly with donors in the areas of economic development and health. For all of them, the onset of COVID-​19 presented a health and governance challenge like no other. It has tested their capacities to the limits in terms of supporting member states through a crisis which, in most cases, has affected all countries in the regions simultaneously. Early in the pandemic, there was an overwhelming recognition within regional organizations that the pandemic would not only bring shared health challenges, but would also represent an unprecedented socio-​economic emergency, with costs distributed unevenly across societies and with a significant differential impact on the lives of men and women. To differing extents, therefore, regional organizations in both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa were able to recognize the gendered implications of lockdown, social distancing policies and economic recession and sought to encourage governments to act quickly to take gender seriously. They flagged up the needs of the many women who work in the informal sector without social security protections, the increases in care burdens, the risks of gender-​based violence and reduced access to sexual reproductive health services and the barriers that were being put in the way of girls’ education. This chapter explores the recommendations and attempts made by regional bodies to join up responses to COVID-​19 in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, and, crucially, asks how far their advice has addressed and planned for the health, development and rights-​based needs of women and girls. We emphasize that, unlike in earlier economic and health crises, regional organizations were quick to pinpoint how the pandemic would exacerbate pre-​existing gender inequalities. However, we ask whether regional organizations have been as effective in going beyond articulating their concerns on gender

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and health and how far they have been able to bring their perspectives to bear on policy-​making at the national level. We suggest that their advice often failed to make it into national policy-​making and conclude that an early understanding of what the pandemic would cost to women and girls did not lead to the introduction of policies to mitigate those costs effectively. Regionalism in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa: what do regional organizations aspire to do in health crises? Ideas of ‘region’ and regionalism in Latin America and sub-​ Saharan Africa are shaped by colonial histories and post-​ independence development pathways and these, in turn, have impacted how and how far they have been able to respond to COVID-​19. The so-​called ‘spaghetti bowl’ of institutions which emerged after regionalist expansion in the 1990s, as well as ideological and policy-​related differences about the future of regionalism, have sometimes hindered possibilities for policy coordination and effective policy response (Covarrubias, 2019: 125). Nevertheless, Riggirozzi (2012) pointed to a new ‘cartography of politics’ with regard to regionalism after 2010 which, she argues, created possibilities for new initiatives, especially in the social domain. This has also enabled a greater capacity and willingness in some regional organizations to more readily recognize the links between gender, health, poverty and social policy. With regard to sub-​Saharan Africa in particular, it translated into an expanding number of initiatives even before the onset of COVID-​19 in the area of health and poverty. African regionalist organizations have been vocal in calling for governments and donors to address ‘growing poverty, the spread of diseases such as AIDS and malaria as well as … marginalisation in the world economy’ (Farrell, 2005: 1). More widely, regional bodies are often staffed by ‘experts’, making them sites of authoritative technical knowledge.

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This concentration of policy expertise means that they can sometimes provide governments with advice, expertise and know-​how (Bianculli, 2020). But it is also the case that, whatever the aspirations of regional organizations, because of their positionality and regional remit, they have often been, or at least appeared, distant and removed from the everyday lives of citizens, especially of the most marginalized, in member states. In response to criticisms of distance from local communities and community needs, organizations have sometimes sought partnerships in civil society and embraced the language of human rights, with varying levels of success (Grugel, 2006; Riggirozzi, 2014, 2015). The role that regional organizations aspired to play in relation to gender, health and development during the COVID-​19 pandemic was clear from the outset: to bring relevant key actors together quickly, to provide a space for policy coordination and collaboration, to support and assist the mobilization of resources to tackle crises, and to serve as sources of information. They wanted to act as a nexus point of expertise in order to contribute to the creation of national-​level policy and practices. At the same time, they offered an independent source of legitimacy for policy decisions taken by governments and norm-​setting institutions (Riggirozzi and Ryan, 2021). Unfortunately, these aspirations have been very difficult to translate into practice at the national level. The suddenness with which COVID-​19 appeared and the speed with which it spread has created policy confusion, made coordination across borders difficult and meant that good advice can easily be ignored –​particularly if putting this advice into practice requires conflicts with established ways of making policy nationally and with embedded interests. As a result, the tension between good advice and conservative policy paradigms, so deeply embedded in relation to gender in many states before COVID-​19, came to shape the reception of regional policy advice during the pandemic.

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Gendering policy: what role for regional organizations? Despite regional organizations’ aspirations to address health crises equitably, history has, unfortunately, told a different story. In many cases, these regional aspirations remained just that, aspirations. Evidence from previous crises in both Africa and Latin America shows that, unfortunately, they have consistently struggled to make their impact felt in policy-​making and policy coordination (Ifediora and Aning, 2017; Serbin Pont, 2018). The reasons for this are multiple, and range from organizational remit, to budgets, to embedded interests and alliances with other actors such as corporate and religious groups, to a generally slow and cumbersome process of policy implementation at the national level. With regard to COVID-​19, regional organizations have also faced a rise in nationalism across the world (Bieber, 2020; Woods et al, 2020), making it difficult for them to step up in terms of their governance role, despite their acknowledged expertise. This relegated them to the role of (often progressive) advice-​givers. The failure to listen to regional-​level advice has been a missed opportunity for more coordinated policies in support of gendering the response to COVID-​19. This is particularly concerning since past experiences indicate that regional organizations can play a positive role in health, development, gender and social policy. Evidence shows that taking issues ‘up’ to the regional level, and outside the national state, can sometimes enable the voices of marginalized communities and of women’s groups to be heard (Merry, 2006; Keck and Sikkink, 2014). This is especially so if the issues being raised are ‘principled issues’ such as human rights, which can be framed in ways that mobilize international attention and as such can, in turn, sometimes leverage policy at the national level (Keck and Sikkink, 2014). The Inter-​American Human Rights System, which is responsible for monitoring, promoting and protecting human rights in 35 countries in the Americas, is an example of regional action around shared values (IAHRN, 2021).

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Regional organizations, perhaps most especially in Latin America, also have a reputation of being more open to feminist, women’s and gender rights organizations than many national government bodies. They sometimes act, as Tarrow (2001) put it, as a kind of ‘coral reef ’ for social mobilization. Certainly, as some national governments in Latin America have become increasingly aggressive towards women, regional spaces have become important sites for defending the rights of women and girls. In the years just prior to the pandemic, in the face of hostility from the right-​wing government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and the failure to acknowledge and tackle Mexico’s rising tide of femicide by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, regionalist organizations, such as ECLAC, via its Gender Division, have articulated a defence of reproductive rights including access to free, safe, legal abortion, sex education and contraception in collaboration with local feminist organizations (ECLAC, 2021). The fact that regional bodies have remained open to feminist, women’s and gender rights groups, and their background in endorsing human rights claims, raised expectations that they would articulate a principled and ethical approach to managing the COVID-​19 crisis. With the onset of the pandemic, regional organizations in both sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America moved quickly in asserting that the socio-​economic impacts of the crisis would not be gender-​neutral, and that women and girls would face more complex and interrelated negative outcomes as a result of the pandemic. In Latin America, for example, the Division of Gender Affairs in ECLAC called for greater involvement of feminist organizations in leadership and decision-​making, and has produced a wealth of evidence, reports, recommendations on unpaid care, domestic violence, women’s economic autonomy and sexual reproductive health, as it has sought to put feminist issues on the agenda of regional states. In sub-​Saharan Africa, meanwhile, the influence of feminist and women’s groups at the regional level was also felt. The

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African Union’s strategy on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) 2018–​2028 was created with input from and dialogue with feminist and women’s rights groups (African Union, nd), with an aim to achieve full gender equality in all spheres of life. The EAC Secretariat has used GEWE to try and address gendered inequalities at the sub-​ regional level and continues to do so during the pandemic. As a result, by the onset of COVID-​19, it was able to call quickly for member states to address the rise in gender-​based violence which was exacerbated by the pandemic, through the creation of regional working groups to advise governments on policies and ensure their commitments to address gender issues and women’s human rights in their COVID-​19 responses (EAC, 2020). In short, it is no surprise that, as early as February 2020, before the pandemic took a foothold in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, communities of experts were converging at a regional level in preparation for the pandemic, including advocating for gendered policy responses. A programme led by PAHO brought together experts from across Latin America including from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil (FIOCRUZ) to train for laboratory diagnosis of the disease to strengthen epidemiological responses across the region (PAHO, 2020a). Experts at FIOCRUZ also argued that healthcare workers could not be treated equally or considered as a ‘homogenous group’ in member states’ policy responses because to do so would mask the gendered impact of the pandemic and damage women. They also quickly observed that across the region, women healthcare workers –​especially Black women –​were disproportionately negatively affected by the absence of necessary resources and less likely to be given PPE and training (Lotta, 2020). They highlighted the gendered violence that emerged with the onset of the pandemic, advocated for alternative arrangements for healthcare workers’ families so as to not expose them to the virus, and highlighted the risks of physical exhaustion. The

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point, above all, is that regional organizations and regional experts tried to encourage governments to go beyond so-​ called gender-​neutral policy-​making, which, far from being neutral, would actively harm women and neglect their needs (Lotta, 2020). Regional responses to COVID-​19: advocating for gendered policies, working with civil society, providing logistical support and (limited) financial help Despite the presence of experts in regional organizations and their openness to making and advocating gendered analyses, ensuring a coherent and gender-​sensitive region-​w ide response to COVID-​19 on the ground was challenging from the outset. Early analyses such as that of Riggirozzi (2020c) at the start of the pandemic, assumed that, in Latin America at least, the accumulated practices of health diplomacy in relation to access to medicines and health norms would enable a regionally coordinated response. But in fact, this has proved extremely difficult. On the one hand, the scale and size of the pandemic was unprecedented, and the full details of its impact on low-​and middle-​income countries were initially difficult to gauge. Furthermore, it is inevitable that political cycles impact upon the prominence and influence of regional organizations: in this respect, 2020 was not a high point in terms of the legitimacy of regional organizations. In Latin America, regionalism and region-​level expertise were weakened by sharp political divisions as governments in key countries such as Brazil and Mexico questioned their value. In sub-​Saharan Africa, meanwhile, ongoing budgetary challenges, donor influence and institutional uncertainty undermined regional coherence. Nevertheless, in sub-​Saharan Africa, the African Union and RECs –​ although with differences at the sub-​regional level –​were able to provide some support in terms of resources and coordination, in ways that Latin American inter-​state institutions were unable to,

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in effect instead leaving UN agencies to step in as providers of information and advice. Latin America was hit more severely, both epidemiologically and socio-​economically, than sub-​Saharan Africa in the first wave in 2020. The pandemic struck with extraordinary force in Latin America in the midst of a crisis of governance, including of regional organizations (Zelicovich, 2020), in which even rationalist health planning and the value of science-​led approaches to COVID-​1 9 were initially questioned by the president in Brazil, one of the worst affected countries (Phillips and Barretto, 2020). This created divisions in the region, leading to sometimes diametrically opposing national responses to the pandemic. Divided between the ‘scientificists’ and the ‘negationists’ (Frenkel, 2020), some countries opted for a mainstream public health response of closing of borders and lockdowns while others, such as Brazil and Mexico, viewed the pandemic as ‘a political hindrance’, even to the point of sometimes incentivizing –​and even taking part in –​mass gatherings in public (Riggirozzi, 2020b). This tendency towards national responses, along with the complexity of the regional governance architecture, and the political and ideological juncture of the region, created a scenario where regional coordination would prove difficult, and regional organizations were consequently limited to the role of ineffectual onlookers desperately trying to be heard in time. Immediate responses were somewhat more uniform and perhaps less ideological, if albeit still strongly national in character, in sub-​Saharan Africa. The initial reaction from countries was to lock down, close borders and meet the challenges of the pandemic as a nation. But there were still challenges here. Porous borders and cross-​border trade in sub-​Saharan Africa quickly led to the African Union arguing that only a joined-​up response would enable member states to meet the challenge, a challenge they must face together (focus group interview, World Vision, 24 August 2020).

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Advocacy and information Despite different circumstances in the two regions, regional organizations ultimately played similar roles, emerging as policy advocates and advisers –​listened to at times, and other times, less so. Critically, their potential to design and support the implementation of collective responses to the pandemic was largely ignored. Nevertheless, they continued to supply governments with information, expertise and knowledge. Two organizations in Latin America stand out in taking a leading role as key providers of information and advice for the region. The first is PAHO, the specialized international health agency for the Americas. PAHO, created in 1902 and part of the Inter-​ American System, is one of the oldest region-​wide institutions in Latin America. It also acts as regional agency for the WHO and as such is part of the United Nations System. PAHO has allocated resources to the training of healthcare workers in the region and has been key in its commitment to promote and enhance intra-​regional sharing of information relating to the pandemic between member states (Bianculli, 2020). ECLAC, also an agency of the United Nations System, which had been created with the aim of fostering economic integration, was also significant. It moved quickly to set up the Covid-​19 Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean, which provides information on the measures followed by all countries in the region, including a focus on gender-​sensitive measures. ECLAC and its Executive Director, Alicia Bárcena, have been vocal in highlighting the gender dimension of this crisis, and the unequal impact that COVID-​19 is having on women in the region. Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, the Commission has published multiple reports, policy briefs, articles and working documents that address the impact of COVID-​19 on women. These documents cover a range of issues, but the most frequently emphasized are the economic autonomy of women, the crisis of care and gender-​ based violence. These areas, ECLAC’s staff argue, are critical

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not just for mitigation, but to ‘build back better’ in a way that incorporates gender equality as a central element of the recovery (interview, Bidegain-Ponte, 24 July 2020). In order to strengthen their advocacy role and the robustness of their advice, ECLAC partnered with other regional and global organizations at various stages during the pandemic to produce reports and other informational documents. As early as April 2020, for example, Alicia Bárcena joined UN Women’s Regional Director María-​Noel Vaeza to argue that the increased risks that women faced during the pandemic meant that governments should take steps to actively support them. In this particular instance they focused on the need above all to address care and work, unpaid care being an area which ECLAC has spent many years advocating for governments to take more seriously: It is crucial to reflect upon and take action regarding the little visibility that care, and women’s diverse activities have in the region’s economies. It is essential to devise responses to the population’s needs using a gender approach. … It is necessary to design and implement comprehensive public policies based on a gender and rights perspective to respond to the COVID-​19 pandemic in the short, medium and long term. (ECLAC, 2020d) It was difficult to translate these understandings into policy, however, despite energetic advocacy. Evidence from both ECLAC and the UNDP’s policy trackers show that policies to tackle women’s extra burden of care have been few and far between. In Latin America, by the end of 2020, there were 106 COVID-​19 policies on gender-​based violence, yet only 41 on questions of care. These limited policies did little to radically restructure home life and the world of work, and instead, were more likely to be exemptions from travel bans at the beginning of the pandemic to allow women to continue to carry out their care work, or informational campaigns urging

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men to also participate in caregiving. Initiatives to address wider gendered inequalities were also few in number: employment and income generation (45), benefits and transfers (37), and participation of women in the digital era (13) (ECLAC, 2021). However, even though socio-​economic policies have lagged behind those implemented to address gender-​based violence, ECLAC has maintained its advocacy of the importance of building out of the pandemic equitably (ECLAC, 2021), arguing for policies that: • Expand fiscal space and increase the progressiveness of tax systems to secure resources for gender equality and women’s rights policies. • Revive severely affected sectors such as commerce, tourism and services, which not only revitalize economies but have a powerful role to play in the recovery of women’s employment. • Pursue measures to ensure that growth in technology sectors is accompanied by an increase in the participation of women, with particular emphasis on the removal of entry barriers in these sectors. • Consider strategies for retraining women, mainly for jobs in the digital economy and occupations that meet the requirements of the new situation. • Prevent the precarization of atypical and emerging forms of employment and guarantee women’s rights to work and at work, particularly in digital and platform employment. • Expand social protection coverage to address the situation of women in all their diversity, without making access to benefits and transfers subject to conditionalities. In sub-​Saharan Africa, the African Union and RECs also expressed concerns about the gendered impacts of COVID-​19. For example, press releases from the African Union indicated growing concerns for girls who would be affected by school closures, particularly in terms of their enhanced exposure to

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sexual and gender-​based violence (African Union, 2020a). This was also the initial focus of the RECs, such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (COMESA, 2020; EAC, 2020). However, as the pandemic evolved, regional organizations in sub-​Saharan Africa began to take on critical roles in supporting the testing and tracing of COVID-​19 infections; for coordinating the allocation of resources between and within regions; for designing and implementing COVID-​19 recovery plans (Erondu, 2020); and in generating the resources needed to finance these recovery approaches. Therefore, while the recognition of the gendered impact COVID-​19 had on women and girls was reflected in regional advocacy, in practice, regional organizations’ logistical and financial support to governments failed to reflect this gender awareness. We explore this in what follows. The African Union and RECs certainly sought to provide clear leadership in relation to at least some of the gendered impacts of COVID-​19. The African Union facilitated the development of guidelines for member countries intending to adopt gender-​sensitive COVID-​19 responses. COMESA developed toolkits and policies, and training was offered to member countries on gender and COVID-​19 (COMESA, 2021a). These policies were then used to hold member states accountable to specific regional gender targets (COMESA, 2021b). Furthermore, regional organizations in sub-​Saharan Africa engaged in downward advocacy on both the gendered health and wider socio-​economic impacts of COVID-​19 on women and girls, directed mostly towards national governments. The African Union and RECs such as the SADC provided recommendations to member states on actions that they could adopt in order to support women and girls (African Union, 2020a; EAC, 2020; ECOWAS, 2020; SADC, 2020a, 2020b). Recommendations were made based on guidelines in pre-​ existing regional strategies (SADC, 2021). The African Union also convened a number of meetings to sensitize member

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states on possible responses to the pandemic, for example on the importance of ensuring good data to better understand the gendered impacts of COVID-​19 (African Union, 2021). Regional organizations offered support in the form of guidance notes (African Union, 2020b). RECs launched campaigns to raise public awareness on the experience of women in the pandemic and post-​pandemic economy (COMESA, 2021a). Moreover, local civil and regional civil society movements supported regional-​level activities and encouraged governments to use their guidelines in national responses to COVID-​ 19. For example, NGO activists worked closely with the African Union to try and leverage their collective capacity to influence member states’ COVID-​19 responses (anonymized interview, ActionAid, 28 July 2020; focus group interview, World Vision, 24 August 2020). They focused on the need to protect the rights and livelihoods for the most at-​r isk groups, including the most marginalized women and girls (anonymized interview, ActionAid, 28 July 2020). Others submitted policy recommendations to the African Union on issues relevant to women and girls such as gender-​based violence and early pregnancies, which were anticipated would prevent girls from returning to school after the pandemic (focus group interview, World Vision, 24 August 2020). Logistical and financial support Regional organizations played a logistical support role to national governments, especially in terms of COVID-​ 19 surveillance and testing. The African Union allocated significant resources to surveillance and testing through the Africa Centre for Disease Control (CDC) (UK Government, 2020), and in turn, RECs sought support for surveillance and testing through the Africa CDC. Consequently, the African Union has a critical role in coordinating regional responses across the continent through the various RECs (Erondu, 2020; focus group interview, World Vision, 24 August 2020). The

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problem, however, was that gender did not feature prominently in this surveillance, so its impact for women’s welfare and wellbeing was reduced. Along with the Africa CDC, the African Union was among the first organizations in the region to develop and implement a coordinated response to COVID-​19 testing (Africa CDC, 2020; Massinga Loembé et al, 2020). But there were differences in sub-​regional capacity. This meant, for example, that because of differences in capacity, ECOWAS, in West Africa, was more able to act than EAC and SADC in East and Southern Africa (Medinilla et al, 2020). By the time the Africa CDC plan for COVID-​19 response was launched, ECOWAS had already set up a Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control (RCSDC) under WAHO (Medinilla et al, 2020). As a result, despite regional-​level support, national governments missed the opportunity to build shared data that would have enabled a rapid and joined up response in future pandemics. Additionally, regional organizations in sub-​Saharan Africa provided (limited) financial support to states and coordinated donor support. The African Union estimated that African countries would need US$100–​150 billion to respond to the immediate health and humanitarian crisis of COVID-​ 19 (Perelman, 2020). In March 2020, it launched its own COVID-​19 response fund to ‘raise resources to strengthen the continental response to COVID-​19’, with a fundraising target of US$647 million in its first six months (African Union, 2020a). International donors, such as the UK government and the European Commission, contributed to this fund (European Commission, 2020b; UK Government, 2020). The African Union Commission (AUC) reallocated further resources from previously programmed activities to majorly supporting the Africa CDC training and capacity building, with some of the resources spent on acquisition of PPE (anonymized interview, African Union, 10 August 2020). Other regional organizations such as the AfDB offered debt-​based financing for COVID-​ 19 responses through the Covid-​19 Response Facility, which

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allocated US$10 billion to African Union member states for COVID-​19 responses (AfDB, 2020). This additional funding was made available with a view that member states’ governments could then prioritize where the money was needed the most. It is here where women lost out. Despite an acknowledgement of the importance of the gendered effects of COVID-​19 on women and girls, regional organizations in sub-​Saharan Africa were unable or unwilling politically to shape the direction of government spending. As a result, no clear gendered directives for the use of these regional resources at national level was attached to the fund. Instead, national governments were simply expected to translate policy guidance into actionable policies. Consequently, women and girls’ health concerns, and the opportunity for regional coordination around gender, were left behind. For instance, a UNESCO report on the EAC indicated that despite the reopening of country borders and the resumption of cross-​ border trade in mid-​2020, informal cross-​border trade between countries such as Kenya and Uganda was not a priority, despite it being critical for the wellbeing of many poor women, the largest beneficiaries of informal cross-​border trade (UNCTAD, 2019; UNECA, 2021). Explaining the limited impact of effective regionalism for women’s rights during the pandemic Despite providing progressive and gender-​sensitive advice from the very start of the pandemic, regional organizations failed in the end to coordinate ‘human, financial and knowledge resources in support of social policies’ (Riggirozzi, 2020c). This can be explained by two trends: a breakdown of regional collaboration and coordination, and reduction or greater control of funding by international development donors. Both of these occurred as knee-​jerk reactions during the initial weeks and months of the pandemic. Some of the shortcomings in terms of the capacity to shape policies resulted from the

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difficulties attendant on making policy at any level –​regional, national or local –​during health pandemics. The experiences of Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa suggest that the health and development crises, rather than forcing countries to come together, can intensify governance stresses to the point that it limits effective regional policy-​making around gender and health. In turn, this has meant national responses are very variable in terms of effectiveness and sensitivity to gendered concerns. Regional organizations faced different challenges in Latin America from those in sub-​Saharan Africa in relation to shaping gendered policy-​making. But, in both regions, gendered policies failed to make it effectively and comprehensively from the regional tier to national policy agendas. Even when regional organizations tried to act in a coordinated way, their room for shaping national policies was limited and their commitment to advancing gendered concerns did not translate into coordinated and joined up policies at the member state level. In sub-​ Saharan Africa, the African Union, through the Africa CDC and RECs, were able to implement a regionally coordinated approach to COVID-​19 surveillance and testing but it failed to take gender into consideration. In Latin America, meanwhile, there are indications of intra-​regional fragmentation resulting in duplication of efforts and ineffective use of scarce resources (Esteves, 2020). Overall, in both regions, innovative ideas for gender policies that had been discussed at the regional level failed to have impact nationally. One challenge regional policy-​m akers faced –​ as did national governments –​was how to address the economic impact of the pandemic, as well as its health and social impacts. In sub-​Saharan Africa, the response of the RECs in particular was to support member states in protecting and reopening borders to trade, so as not to damage economies (anonymized interview, GIZ, 30 July 2020).1 In the process, they sometimes relegated social development to a secondary level of importance, and they certainly did not take a gendered

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perspective to economic protection policies. On the whole, their efforts to bolster the economy were successful: for example, Kenya’s trade within the region grew in July 2020 –​ only five months after COVID-​19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO –​mainly due to an increase in re-​exports to neighbouring countries such as Tanzania and Rwanda (Mold and Mveyange, 2020). But these apparent successes masked the costs to women traders at the borders, who were not protected by policies to reopen trade –​a missed opportunity that we explore further in Chapter Five. The tendency in crises of health and development is for conservative and established policy paradigms to trump innovation and experimentation and for the economy to take precedence over the wellbeing of marginalized communities –​ and for regional organizations to be caught between the two. During COVID-​19, this played out in different ways in sub-​ Saharan Africa and Latin America. So, as we have already noted, the African Union quickly focused on strengthening a continent-​wide capacity for testing and awareness, with the need to protect marginalized groups from the impacts of the pandemic playing an important but secondary role. This was exacerbated by the fact that it was not clear which tier of governance should take the lead in addressing the social and gendered impacts of COVID-​19. In regional organizations still dominated in the main by men, issues that disproportionately negatively affect women were not prioritized (anonymized interview, African Union, 10 August 2020). For example, in a situation of finite human and economic resources, the reallocation of funding towards testing and surveillance by the AUC meant in practice slower progress on design and implementation of social protection and a consequent neglect of the needs of women and girls (anonymized interview, AUC, 27 July 2020). According to interviews with a range of local civil society organizations (anonymized interview, GIZ, 30 July 2020; anonymized interview, ActionAid, 28 July 2020), both regions had impressive gender action plans but there was

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a failure to deliver and a failure to include women and girls in advocacy or the design of policy proposals. More attention needs to be paid to why crises fail women and girls. Even when the needs of the most vulnerable are quickly acknowledged, there is a gap between recognition and effective policy-​making. Wenham (2021) argues, based on research in the UK, that one reason women are failed is a lack of data that, in turn, creates a serious barrier to prioritizing women. This was the case as well in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. But it was not the only reason. There was an understanding in both regions, based on past experiences, of how health crises would impact on women and girls, even if the detailed data were lacking. During the 2014 Ebola and 2016 Zika outbreaks, it is widely accepted that women bore a greater burden of these health emergencies than men, with migrant, rural and impoverished women the most affected (Davies and Bennett, 2016; Gates Foundation, 2020). The decision not to prioritize protection and empowerment for women and girls suggests, in fact, that the bigger problem may lie fundamentally with misogynistic institutions (Harcourt, 2016), which consistently create and perpetuate barriers to the advancement of gender equality (UNICEF, 2016), rather than a lack of information or data. Experts within regional organizations could –​and did –​ make coherent and evidence-​based arguments highlighting the impact COVID-​19 would have on women and girls; but national governments, informed by other concerns and influenced above all by masculinist perspectives of the national interest, did not need to listen. Regional organizations were also much weaker in terms of resources compared to international organizations, particularly those which controlled the financial response to the pandemic. In both regions, the pandemic resulted in a reinforcement of external donors’ importance in regional and national development, and the weakened role of regional organizations. The weakness of regional responses in sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America created opportunities (to different degrees) for

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external actors to dominate COVID-​19 responses. Esteves and van Staden (2020) highlight the role that China and the United States played in the COVID-​19 responses in Africa and Latin America. Institutional donors such as the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union and the Australian Aid (DFAT) and private institutional donors such as the Gates Foundation certainly all recognized that low-​and middle-​income countries would be most severely impacted by COVID-​19 policies. However, donors tended also to see regional organizations, especially in sub-​Saharan Africa, as instruments for delivering their policies, rather than autonomous and equal policy-​makers in their own right. As such, aid, and philanthropic actors, as with other multilateral institutions, set out a fiscal expansionary approach, targeting their responses to regional institutions and channelling funds through their pre-​existing bilateral links. The reinforcement of the roles of regional organizations as advice-​givers (sometimes from the side-​lines) rather than policy-​makers highlights concerns about the roles of these institutions moving forward. In sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America, regional organizations depend on financial contributions from member states. The reduced economic capacity of member states is projected to result in reduced remittances to regional organizations. The African Union’s financial autonomy, for example, was projected to experience difficulties moving forward and out of the pandemic due to several factors, one of them being the reduced income from countries and donors due to their adoption of costly recovery plans (Matheis and Staeger, 2020). In 2020, PAHO announced that it was facing insolvency due to delayed payments from the United States and other member countries such as Brazil (King, A. et al, 2020). In Latin America, the economic effects of COVID-​19 and the responses that emerged have resulted in speculation that regional organizations may even become ‘victims’ of the pandemic (Arredondo, 2020). If so, whatever the shortcomings of these organizations in practice, this will

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be an undoubted loss of important advocates for the rights and needs of women and girls. Conclusion Responses to the pandemic in Latin America and sub-​ Saharan Africa were hampered by the relative weaknesses of regional organizations vis-​à-​vis national governments. Despite acknowledged health and development expertise, regional organizations have tended to serve as advocates and advice-​givers, as opposed to key players, during COVID-​19. Even though there are differences between the two regions, the overall trend is a growth in nationalism, which resulted in immediate national responses to the pandemic, sometimes to the detriment of the regions more holistically. Lockdowns, curfews, border closures, social distancing measures and over-​stretched health services that depend unevenly on women’s labour have had devastating gendered social and economic impacts. In Latin America, the pandemic arrived at a moment of low levels of regional cooperation, with many of the organizations that had been at the forefront of regional solidarity in the mid-​2000s now dismantled or in crisis. As a result, the spaces for coordination, or the political leadership to do so, were almost completely absent. The political differences between governments in the region, and the different responses to the pandemic, only exacerbated the tensions. In that context, UN agencies PAHO and ECLAC emerged as sources of reliable information at the regional level and as advice-​givers. ECLAC in particular showed leadership in highlighting and promoting the need to address gender inequalities in a significant way as part of the rebuilding of the region during and after the pandemic, but it was less successful in influencing policy at the national level. In sub-​Saharan Africa, governments were grappling with an ongoing scarcity of resources with which to respond to the

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pandemic and, in many cases, member states of the African Union (and sub-​national bodies) chose to partially or wholly ignore their gendered advice and advocacy, in favour of national responses that prioritized other areas. Furthermore, logistical and financial support that was provided by the African Union was done so in a non-​gendered way and therefore was paradoxical to the advocacy that it was providing. In both regions, the inability on the behalf of regional organizations to push national governments to prioritize gender within their initial responses was quickly evident. Virus responses were taken at the domestic level and this was overwhelmingly focused at containing COVID-​19’s spread through the implementation of testing and tracking. While this initial response was perhaps understandable in the context of extremely weak health systems with limited resources, the failure to take gender seriously in almost all areas of policy raises questions about priorities. Even if the immediate priority was to be virus containment (OECD, 2020a), there was a clear failure in the medium term to use the crisis as an opportunity to address the many long-​standing inequalities that put women and girls at extreme risk in the first place.

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FOUR

Exacerbating Inequalities: Gender-​Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Health

Introduction Gender-​based violence and sexual and reproductive health affect all areas of development, from human wellbeing to economic growth. Living a life free from violence and with autonomy over one’s own body and sexuality are fundamental human rights. The fact that these are so frequently denied to girls and women is one reason why the feminist movement in Latin America, whose campaign priorities above all deal with tackling femicide and impunity, and guaranteeing sexual and reproductive rights, is growing exponentially (El País, 2020; Tesoriero, 2020). Understanding the significance of the body –​especially the female body –​is a fundamental element of feminism because the level of autonomy and dignity we have in relation to our bodies deeply impacts upon all areas of life. This is more pronounced for people living in ‘marginalised bodies’ (Shildrick and Price, 2017: 2). How bodies are seen socially, culturally and politically contributes to the bases of discrimination that different groups face. It means that characteristics such as race, class and disability ‘intersect to constitute particular ways of seeing, and of devaluing, bodies … whilst all such marginalised bodies are potentially unsettling, what is at issue for women specifically is that, supposedly, the female body is intrinsically unpredictable, leaky and disruptive’ (Shildrick and Price, 2017: 2). With this in mind, then, we can begin to understand the roots of why

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some people –​above all, women and girls –​enjoy less rights and policy protection with regards to their bodies. There are risks in eliding women’s human rights into struggles associated with the body and physical integrity rights. Miller (2004) argues that it constructs women not as citizens but as victims. We agree that reducing girls and women to their bodies can be harmful, but having control over one’s own body is an essential starting point to enable other freedoms and opportunities. Here, then, what we want to do is show is how the failure to respect and uphold women and girls’ bodily rights impacts upon their experience and opportunities in all other realms of life, including health, education and labour. These themes are misclassified as ‘private’ versus ‘public’, which misses the complex interplay between them. Gender-​based violence directly impacts the health and education outcomes of girls and women, puts immense pressure on social welfare systems and costs some countries up to ‘3.7 per cent of their GDP –​ more than double what most governments spend on education’ (World Bank, 2019). Similarly, access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services and guaranteeing women’s sexual and reproductive rights is essential for women’s health and equality. A contemporary example from Tanzania illustrates this well: in some regions, girls who have become pregnant during COVID-​19 school closures will not be allowed to return to school (World Vision, 2020). During times of crisis, gender-​based violence against women and girls increases, and funding for sexual and reproductive health programmes is reduced (True, 2012; Tanyag, 2018; Gates, 2020). But the challenges presented by COVID-​19, in particular ‘stay at home’ and social distancing measures, have increased the challenges faced by women and girls even more than we would perhaps normally expect to see in crisis situations. Home is not the safest place for many women and girls. Domestic or intimate partner gender-​based violence became a ‘shadow pandemic’ during the COVID-​19 pandemic (UN Women, 2020a). The sharp increase in gender-​based

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violence comes as no surprise to experts who, since the very beginning of the crisis, warned that an increase was likely to happen. Yet, as we argue in this chapter, policies are falling short of punishing perpetrators and of protecting women –​ and, ultimately, saving their lives. Similarly, COVID-​19 has exacerbated women and girls’ unmet sexual and reproductive health needs. In both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, rates of child sexual abuse and exploitation and of child and adolescent pregnancy were already high pre-​pandemic, as were child and early marriages (Orchid Project, 2020; Palacio and Singh, 2020; Plan International, 2020; Plan International and Girls Not Brides, 2020). We show here that while negative outcomes in sexual and reproductive health during the pandemic can be attributed to issues such as disruptions in supply chains or travel restrictions, the absence of mitigation policies reflects governments’ failure to prioritize women and girls’ health needs. For some women and girls, specific socio-​political and structural elements cause further challenges. There are additional practical barriers in terms of accessing support, services and supplies for women living in rural communities, as well as for teenage girls, and migrant women and girls. Discrimination, prejudice and racism at individual and system-​ level mean that some women and girls are more targeted for abuse and less likely to receive support because of characteristics including their ethnicity, age and/​or disability. Poverty cuts across, underscores and emphasizes negative outcomes in terms of gender-​based violence and sexual and reproductive health for all girls and women, especially if they have other intersectional characteristics that compound their experience of discrimination. Gender-​based violence before COVID-​19 Gender-​based violence can be understood as ‘any act of gender-​ based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical,

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sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life’ (United Nations General Assembly, 1993: 3). Globally, ‘gender-​based violence is the leading cause of death of women between the ages of 19 and 44’ (True, 2012: 8). The prevalence of femicide committed by an intimate partner, and of gender-​based violence, is greatest in Africa, followed by the Americas (UNODC, 2019). Sub-​ Saharan Africa has particularly high rates, justified in some cases by permissive social norms (Cools and Kotsadam, 2017). Up to 65.64 per cent of ever-​partnered women and girls in Central sub-​Saharan Africa have experienced intimate partner gender-​based violence, more than double the global average of 30 per cent (Palermo et al, 2014). Muluneh et al (2020: 915) found differences between and within countries in the region, ‘from as low as 13.9 per cent … in … perinatal women with depression symptoms in South Africa to as high as 97 per cent … in … rural women in Nigeria’. In Latin America, about a third of women aged 15–​49 have experienced gender-​based violence committed by an intimate partner. These rates also vary, from about 14–​17 per cent to 58.5 per cent nationally, with women in the Andean region most likely to be victims of gender-​based violence committed by an intimate partner (PAHO, 2019). In absolute numbers, more women are killed in Brazil, Mexico and Honduras than other Latin American countries (ECLAC, nd). Gender-​based violence is frequently considered a hidden phenomenon, and for this reason, it is known as the silent pandemic (UN Women, 2020a). But sustained activism by women and feminists means it is becoming increasingly visible. Latin America has become a particularly active site of mobilization against gender-​based violence. Feminist activism, in the midst of political crisis, has meant that in Mexico feminist movements are considered the country’s ‘principal opposition movement’ (Castellanos, 2021). In Argentina, feminist mobilization delivered the legalization of abortion in Argentina

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in 2020. Chilean feminists can count at least two major successes resulting from their activism during the 2019 student uprisings in the country. First, feminist collective LasTesis led a global activist movement against femicide and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators with the song and performance Un Violador En El Camino (A Rapist in Your Path). Second, feminists were key players in demanding constitutional reform and, in the midst of the pandemic in 2021, achieved not only gender parity in the Constitutional Assembly that will deliver a new democratic constitution (McGowan, 2021) but enabled women to do so well in the elections that seats had to be adjusted to allow equal representation of men (Bartlett, 2021). These are resounding successes. But wholesale policy change cannot take place unless policy-​makers also recognize the need for change. Responding to COVID-​19: calls for gender-​based protections It was clear at the beginning of the pandemic that women and girls would face a heightened risk of gender-​based violence. Experts warned that social distancing policies quickly implemented by many governments would isolate women with their aggressors, increase stress, change inter-​household bargaining power, and lead to male backlash, as economic contractions plunged millions into poverty and extreme poverty (Arenas-​Arroyo et al, 2020). As such, at the very outset of the COVID-​19 crisis, major global development organizations disseminated a unified message, with the UN, WHO and the World Bank all identifying gender-​based violence as a priority area for government policies (UN Women, 2020c; WHO, 2020b; World Bank, 2020b). In effect, they forewarned states that they would need to take urgent action to mitigate increases in gender-​based violence. On 7 April 2020, the WHO outlined the role and responsibilities of health systems in preventing and attending to gender-​based

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violence, drawing attention to early reports from countries including China, the UK and US that indicated sharp rises as a result of social distancing measures (WHO, 2020b). Two days later, on 9 April, the UN (2020a: 2) concurred that ‘economic and social stress coupled with restricted movement and social isolation measures, [means] gender-​based violence is increasing exponentially’. The World Bank (2020a: 2) followed suit on 16 April 2020, albeit with an interesting comment on the ‘heightened perception’ of impunity for perpetrators –​as opposed to actual impunity, which is really the case –​which would result from ‘the stretched capacity of response services’ and ‘reduction in the protection and support available’. In Latin America and sub-​S aharan Africa, regional organizations such as ECLAC, the OAS and PAHO in Latin America and the African Union, the EAC and SADC in sub-​Saharan Africa adopted a similar line, though to differing extents. On 8 April 2020, ECLAC and UN Women held their first joint meeting to discuss the response to the COVID-​ 19 pandemic. ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena recognized that ‘the quarantine or confinement situation entails serious threats to the security of many women and girls who suffer violence in their homes … since it increases the amount of time that women are alone with their abusers while reducing the possibilities for seeking help’ (ECLAC, 2020d). On 10 April 2020, the OAS released its first report on gender and COVID-​19, stating that ‘indicators show an increase in gender violence, which is exacerbated by confinement and by the limited access of women to public services for the care, prevention and punishment of violence’ (OAS, 2020: 3). In their first informational brief on gender and COVID-​19 released on 30 April 2020, PAHO recognized gender-​based violence as a priority ‘gender consideration’ and echoed advice from global development organizations urging governments to ‘implement measures to protect women and children from violence, providing violence-​ related protective services, expanding helplines and the use of technology, and providing

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innovative ways to request restraining orders from police and the courts’ (PAHO, 2020b: 13). The response from regional organizations in sub-​Saharan Africa was somewhat less comprehensive, however. The African Union highlighted the contextual challenges and recommended similar policy responses such as the development of free hotlines and widespread informational campaigns. However, along with these recommendations that put the onus on women to act, they called for governments to take action against perpetrators of violence: ‘Establish or strengthen existing special units within the police to deal with domestic violence during this period of COVID-​19; Raise awareness of police and judiciary about the increase of violence against women; Create special mechanisms to ensure that perpetrators of violence are speedily prosecuted and convicted’ (African Union, 2020b: 15). On 22 April 2020, SADC issued its second bulletin on COVID-​19, calling for member states to ‘pay special attention’ to increasing gender-​based violence, and to ‘incorporate gender perspectives in all responses to COVID-​19 to ensure that actions during, and after the COVID-​19 crisis aim to build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies’ (SADC, 2020a: 3). The same day, SADC Executive Secretary, Dr Stergomena Lawrence Tax, also drew attention to the rising crisis of gender-​based violence and the dangers and challenges posed by isolation and social distancing policies (SADC, 2020b). Subsequent bulletins in late April and July (bulletins 3 and 9) continued to urge member states to act. But there was little in the way of firm policy recommendations, or of discussions of budgets that governments should ring-​fence to ensure protection for women and girls. The EAC has focused its attentions towards the rise in gender-​based violence. As highlighted in Chapter Three, it supported the creation of regional working groups to advise governments on policies and importantly to remind them of their commitments to address gender issues through

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COVID-​19 responses (EAC, 2020). However, other regional bodies in sub-​Saharan Africa were less attuned to the problem. Despite having a dedicated Gender and Development Centre, ECOWAS was considerably less active. The Regional Child Protection Working Group called for member states to tackle the problem on 20 April 2020, which was followed some months later, in October 2020, by a series of meetings to discuss gendered impacts of COVID-​19 in the region. But again, little concrete action resulted from these declarations. Sharp rises in gender-​based violence in 2020: a crisis foretold The risks of violence committed by men towards women and girls during lockdowns were understood before the impact of the crisis could be measured. But the tendency of governments to act on the basis of evidence meant that regional experts were forced to be more cautious than perhaps they wanted to be when discussing the threat. Moreover, at the beginning of the crisis, emerging data were often complex and confusing, and heavily skewed towards high-​income countries (Peterman et al, 2020). For example, in April 2020 in South Africa, ‘calls to gender-​based violence centers were reportedly increasing’ but, in May, ‘rape and sexual assault cases were down by 50 per cent’ (Peterman et al, 2020: 1). One measure suggests gender-​based violence was increasing in April, while a different indicator for the following month suggested that it was suddenly much less of an issue. In another example, a study in Mexico City in May 2020 measured changes in calls regarding domestic violence, for example calls for psychological services and calls for legal services. Calls for psychological services increased while the number of domestic violence calls stayed the same, and calls for legal services decreased (Silverio-​Murillo et al, 2020). As a result, policy-​makers were tentative. Nicole Bidegain-​ Ponte, Social Affairs Officer of the Division for Gender Affairs at ECLAC, explained why ECLAC was still taking a

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cautious position with regards to gender-​based violence data in July 2020: ‘We know that there has been an increase for example in calls from women who are victims of violence … but in ECLAC, we are still very cautious about the figures. We cannot say they have increased by this amount or this percentage because we know that first we have to look at the official statistics, then make a comparison with this time last year, and at the Division of Gender Affairs, we work above all with figures related to femicide. So, we are in the process of accompanying countries to figure out how we will measure this phenomenon in this distinct context. But yes … we do know about the increase in phone calls, but for example there are countries where the calls have gone up, but the complaints to police have gone down.’ (Interview, Bidegain-​Ponte, 24 July 2020) As 2020 came to a close, however, the tsunami of gender-​based violence and femicide taking place during the pandemic was clear. It had been a crisis foretold. Studies in Argentina (Perez-​ Vincent et al, 2020), Peru (Agüero, 2021, Ethiopia (Gebrewahd et al, 2020), Nigeria (Fawole et al, 2020; Oguntayo et al, 2020) and Uganda (Mahmud and Riley, 2020) all indicated significant increases in violence against women. Evidence from Mexico revealed that 2020 saw the highest number of femicides ever recorded in that country (Migueles, 2020). Factors identified in these studies included restricted mobility, restricted support from social networks, increased economic pressure (especially in poorer families), poor living conditions and increased risk for women who were not economically independent or who were in an arranged marriage (Peterman and O’Donnell, 2020). Furthermore, the contradictory data from the beginning of the pandemic could be explained by several practical reasons. COVID-​19 policies reduced the availability of support services and victims’ ability to report, as well as affecting data-​gathering

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itself (on gender-​based violence and other issues), especially in states with over-​stretched and underfunded bureaucracies, meaning government data has been less reliable than usual (Peterman et al, 2020). So, where early studies appeared to indicate decreases in violence, these may well have been simply a major under-​reporting of violence due to the isolation imposed on victims because of COVID-​19. In Mexico, for example, it seems that the absence of reported cases of child abuse and violence against children was due to school closures and the loss of safe spaces for children to speak out (Peterman and O’Donnell, 2020; Peterman et al, 2020; UNICEF, 2020b). Despite warnings and growing evidence, national policy response falls short By September 2020, UNDP had identified 113 COVID-​19 gender-​sensitive measures within 29 of the 46 sub-​Saharan African countries and territories, and 221 within the 20 Latin American countries and territories (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c). In both regions, the measures are categorized as dealing with violence against women and girls, women’s economic security, and unpaid care. ‘Echoing global trends’, in both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa the majority of gender-​sensitive measures address violence against women and girls –​69 per cent and 57 per cent respectively –​and the least address unpaid care. In both regions, the majority of measures are designed to strengthen or maintain support services for women, followed by measures to increase awareness of gender-​based violence. Finally, the smallest number of measures are aimed at improving data collection. Almost no measures were implemented in either region that were explicitly aimed specifically at the most marginalized or vulnerable women (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c). The decision to introduce specific measures may sound positive. However, a closer look at their content suggests the need for a more nuanced analysis. The measures introduced are not comprehensive, and very rarely address men’s role

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as perpetrators of violence in any substantial way. There are helplines and informational campaigns but few actions to address aggressors’ responsibility and tackle impunity. Every country in Latin America introduced at least two COVID-​19 specific measures to address gender-​based violence, but two-​ thirds of these were about strengthening support mechanisms for women survivors of violence, mainly through helplines and other reporting mechanisms (24 measures in 16 countries). The second most common policy response was informational campaigns. These policies are only valuable when they are accompanied by other social and legal services, such as safe housing and free access to a lawyer (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c). The measures have done little to address how the police and courts should respond. Across Latin America, COVID-​19 judicial or police responses are, effectively, to continue doing what they have always done, which is troubling given the existing rates of impunity in cases of gender-​based violence in the continent (OHCHR, 2014). A case in point is Mexico, where 97 per cent of cases of femicide end in impunity (Perez Osorio, 2020). There is some minimal training envisaged to encourage the police and the courts to treat survivors of violence appropriately, for example in Argentina; but the training is so basic that it begs the question of how police dealt with such cases before and, additionally, whether they will even remain after the pandemic ends. The situation regarding shelters is more varied, but remains problematic. In Argentina, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, women’s shelters were declared essential services and were ordered to remain open during the pandemic. Although, at the same time, in Mexico, President Lopez Obrador controversially stated that 90 per cent of calls to domestic violence helplines were fake (Animal Político, 2020). In September 2020, feminist activists in Mexico City occupied the National Commission for Human Rights and repurposed it as a shelter for women fleeing violence. This can be read as both a symbolic and practical act to highlight the lack of state support

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for victims of domestic violence. Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica and Paraguay committed to keeping shelters open but fell short of declaring them essential services. Ecuador also committed to continuing to financially support shelters; yet there are only four local authority-​run shelters in the country, with the rest being administered by civil society (UNDP, 2020b). The situation is worse in sub-​Saharan Africa. There, the UNDP identified 64 measures to tackle gender-​based violence in 17 countries (UNDP, 2020c). This is positive; however, in 29 other sub-​Saharan African countries and territories, no specific COVID-​19 measures have been identified to tackle gender-​based violence. The most common type of measure is either establishing or extending the hours of assistance for helplines. Again, the effectiveness of these will be limited if measures to strengthen legal response or to provide accessible and safe shelters are not implemented concurrently. Only South Africa and Zimbabwe have any solid measures relating to shelter provision –​both countries committed to keeping shelters open, and the South African government said they would create ten more shelters (UNDP, 2020c). Service providers supporting women victims of gender-​based violence in sub-​Saharan Africa reported several practical challenges which hindered their work in the context of COVID-​19. These included a lack of funding and other resources, and social distancing measures impeding travel and rehousing options (Majumdar and Wood, 2020). In many of these countries, support services barely existed even before the pandemic. For example, in Kenya, ‘although there is a national gender-​based violence helpline, there is only one state-​funded shelter (countrywide) –​launched in June 2020 in Makueni County –​where survivors of violence can go to seek temporary protection’ (Muraya, 2020: 2). A majority of services supporting child victims of violence in Eastern and Southern Africa (57 per cent), West and Central Africa (71 per cent) and Latin America and the Caribbean (83 per cent) reported disruption to services during the initial stages of the pandemic (UNICEF, 2020b).

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In Ethiopia, the only judicial measure introduced is to ensure that courts continue to hear cases of gender-​based violence. In Malawi and Cote d’Ivoire, cases of gender-​based violence are fast-​tracked. In South Africa and Zimbabwe, ‘domestic violence cases continue to be treated as urgent by courts, the Victim Friendly Unit is operating, and measures have been taken to enable that services such as shelters continue to function’ (UNDP, 2020c: 5). According to the UNDP, there are no other specific COVID-​19 judicial policies in sub-​Saharan Africa that deal with gender-​based violence. Going forward, the UNDP is clear that ‘services to respond to and prevent [violence against women and girls] must be treated as essential services and an integral part of national and local COVID-​19 response plans’ (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c). Both regions have solid strategies for the advancement of gender equality that they can use to inform policies, such as the African Union’s Maputo Platform of Action 2016–​2030 and ECLAC’s Montevideo Strategy. These will be important. However, the specific context of the pandemic must also be considered and ‘urgent financial investment and support’ for service providers is required (Peterman et al, 2020: 7; see also Majumdar and Wood, 2020). Peterman et al (2020: 8) have also pointed to evidence which shows that ‘interventions which strengthen social networks without directly targeting risk factors for violence may still mitigate violence. Similarly, the evidence reviewed underscores how economic insecurity may increase the risk of violence. Therefore, economic strengthening interventions addressing income or employment gaps induced by Covid-​19 may be critical to reducing violence risk’. Why then, have governments not paid more attention to this challenge? We posed this question in interviews with policy-​makers in both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. One answer that was offered several times, and from different institutions, echoed a long-​standing gendered development challenge: during crises, there is a need to prioritize resources, which is a challenge because existing resources are already

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insufficient. What this means in practice is that budgets are re-​evaluated and redeployed to other areas for pandemic responses that are deemed critical for frontline health services, at the cost of policies that address deep-​seated issues that are difficult to solve. In effect, even gender-​based violence, in principle a flagship policy for many development organizations, is somehow deemed less ‘critical’ in the midst of a pandemic. We were told by the African Union that: ‘Everybody at the African Union knows there will be losses to a variety of programmes but there are priorities, and we have to respect that. The top priorities are [pandemic] health, PPE, ventilators and the [funding] amounts that were available for programmes pre-​Covid [for gender programmes], will not be there.’ (Anonymized interview, African Union, 10 August 2020) In our view, this approach puts women in real danger. It means that when resources are scarce alternative programmes –​or even debt servicing –​takes precedence over public service provision for women and girls, including gender-​based pandemic programmes. Sexual and reproductive health: uneven provision even before COVID-​19 The provision of inclusive and respectful sexual and reproductive rights services are also essential elements in enabling girls and women to live healthy and safe lives with dignity, autonomy and privacy. Because they are so important, girls’ and women’s sexual and reproductive rights are an essential part of the SDGs, especially SDG 5 (gender equality) and targets 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and 5.6, which deal with ending discrimination, gender-​based violence and harmful practices, and sexual and reproductive health rights. Targets under SDG 3 (health) address maternal health and family planning. Securing these rights for women

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and girls also impact on ending poverty, reducing inequality and accessing education too, since when girls and women can exercise autonomy over their own bodies and –​crucially –​ avoid unwanted and/​or adolescent pregnancy, they can achieve better socio-​economic outcomes, for themselves and, by extension, their communities. Sexual and reproductive rights, then, are fundamental rights for girls and women. But the availability of and access to sexual and reproductive health services is determined by political economic structural factors, and also socio-​cultural values, meaning that some girls and women experience much less autonomy over, and receive much less respect for, their bodies and sexuality than others. Decisions on women and girls’ reproductive rights take place at the national, regional and city levels above all, with international agreements forming only part of the discussions. National and local politics are rarely centred around the needs of women, especially poor women, and are frequently dominated by wealthy, older men, whose personal beliefs and/​or political interests impact directly on the lives of the poorest and most marginalized women and girls. In recent years, sexual and reproductive rights have even been ‘a point of contention at the UN’; and when these points of contention translate into action such as the Trump administration’s decision to enact the ‘global gag rule’ policy, the outcomes are devastating, especially for the most marginalized women and girls (Kennedy, 2020; Batha, 2021).1 It is no surprise then that even before the pandemic, women’s and girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health services and supplies was limited. In Latin America, ‘United Nations projections from early 2020 estimated that 19,720,000 women lacked access to modern contraceptives’ (UN Women, 2020c). Lack of contraceptives is a major (though not the only) factor in unwanted pregnancies, rates of which in poorer countries are at least three times higher than those in wealthier countries (Palacio and Singh, 2020). In places where abortion is restricted, in the past 30 years, ‘there has been a 39 per cent

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increase in the proportion of pregnancies ending in abortion’. Unsafe abortions account for between 5 and 13 per cent of deaths (between 22,800 and 59,280 lives) during pregnancy and childbirth (Palacio and Singh, 2020). Sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America have the highest rates of child and adolescent pregnancy in the world (ECLAC, 2020e), with Latin America being the only region in the world where pregnancy in girls under the age of 15 is rising. Unplanned and/​or unwanted pregnancies among adolescents are ‘a major public health and social problem’ (ECLAC, 2020e: 2). Globally, the leading cause of death for girls aged 15–​19 is complications arising from pregnancy and childbirth (Plan International, 2020). In Latin America, the majority of these pregnancies are disproportionately likely to happen to girls and adolescents from poor, Indigenous or Black communities, and occur as a result of sexual violence, lack of information or lack of access to contraceptives (ECLAC, 2020e; UNFPA, 2020a). Early pregnancies exacerbate and perpetuate the pre-​existing socio-​economic inequalities which prevail for the most marginalized groups; they are associated with greater health problems, higher possibility of school dropout and/​or low educational attainment, fewer opportunities for employment and a higher likelihood of carrying out unpaid domestic work (UNFPA, 2020b). Pandemics increase sexual and reproductive health risks There is no shortage of evidence from previous crises that shows that sexual and reproductive health services, which are as, if not more, essential during crises that reduce women’s mobility and access to services outside the home, can be the first to be closed down or reduced due to reduced funding (WHO, 2020c: 29). This was true in the Ebola outbreaks of 2014–​2016 in West Africa and 2018–​2019 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (IRC, 2020; Wenham et al, 2020). Cases of adolescent pregnancy doubled in Sierra Leone during the

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2014–​2016 Ebola crisis, and with it, a 75 per cent increase in maternal mortality (Plan International, 2020; Plan International and Girls Not Brides, 2020: 3). In Latin America, during the Zika outbreak of 2015–​2017, ‘requests for online abortion pills from women in Brazil doubled between November 2015 and March 2016 and increased by more than a third in El Salvador (35 per cent) and in Colombia (38.7 per cent)’ (Wenham et al, 2020: 1). Early in the COVID-​19 crisis, experts warned of the potentially devastating consequences if sexual and reproductive health needs and rights were not met. Essential reproductive health services were affected by cuts in supply chains of contraceptives and closures of reproductive health care clinics and outreach services; travel restrictions, fear of infection and loss of income all affected girls and women’s ability to access services and supplies. Added to this ‘perfect storm’ were global level ‘potential funding reductions due to the United States’ announced withdrawal from the World Health Organization’ (Palacio and Singh, 2020). Experts warned that these restrictions could undo decades of progress towards securing girls’ and women’s reproductive rights. Predictions ranged from ‘around 7 million unintended pregnancies in 114 developing countries’, partly because around 47 million women could discontinue contraceptive use (UNFPA, 2020a: 58), to ‘an additional 15 million unintended pregnancies and 3.3 million more unsafe abortions over a one-​year period’ (Palacio and Singh, 2020). In June 2020, the WHO warned that: Reductions in the availability of essential sexual and reproductive health and [maternal and natal health] services will result in many thousands of maternal and newborn deaths due to millions of additional unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and complicated deliveries without access to essential and emergency care. Even a 10 per cent reduction in these services could result in an

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estimated 15 million unintended pregnancies, 3.3 million unsafe abortions and 29 000 additional maternal deaths during the next 12 months. (WHO, 2020c: 29) As the crisis deepened, it became clear that these predictions were coming true. In Niger, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Benin, a number of maternal hospitals and other maternal health centres closed. This has been attributed to several factors: resources being diverted, staffing shortages due to COVID-​19 infection or fear of infection, and staff members choosing to work for aid agencies in order to access better salaries (Equipop, 2020). The closure of services was even more pronounced in rural areas. In Benin and Côte d’Ivoire, disruption to international and national supply chains left women and girls without access to pregnancy tests, implants and other contraceptives, with women in rural areas being left most isolated. Even when services have remained open, there has been a decline in attendance, possibly due to travel restrictions, inability to leave the home, fear of attending health centres which may have been viewed as sites of contamination, or fears of catching COVID-​19 in general. This fear is particularly pronounced for people with underlying health conditions such as HIV or TB (Equipop, 2020). Women and girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health supplies and services has also been severely affected in Latin America –​indeed, it is the global region where access to contraceptives has been most significantly reduced. It has been estimated that ‘3.9 million women would discontinue contraception due to difficulties in access in the private sector and 13.1 million due to shortages in public services’ (UNFPA, 2020c: 58). Combined with the already substantial pre-​pandemic unmet need for contraceptives in the region, ‘the percentage of women in the region facing an unmet need for contraceptives will go back to levels of 27 years ago, from 11.4 per cent to 16.3 per cent’ (UNFPA, 2020c: 58). Early evidence from Bolivia and Guatemala suggests that adolescent

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girls are experiencing particular difficulties (UNFPA, 2020c). Lack of access to contraceptives combined with the other risk factors discussed in this chapter has led experts to predict that around half a million additional adolescent pregnancies could occur during the pandemic in Latin America; they warn that ‘these figures are based on a moderate scenario and could literally double in an extreme scenario’, causing setbacks in the Specific Adolescent Fertility Rate of between four to eight years (UNFPA, 2020c: 62). Girls and adolescents are especially vulnerable during COVID-​19 Increasing time at home and online are heightening risks for girls and adolescents. As discussed earlier, when schools close, reporting of child and adolescent sexual abuse decreases. Six months into the pandemic, in September 2020, Interpol reported a decrease in reporting of child sexual abuse from victims, and a decrease in countries’ use of the International Child Sexual Exploitation (ICSE) database, meaning that reporting to the database by police is also decreasing. Signalling disruptions to ways of working, reduction of staff and changes in priorities because of COVID-​19 as causes, Interpol (2020: 7) observed that ‘60 per cent of member countries who regularly use the ICSE database have either not accessed the database or have seen a significant reduction in their activities during the COVID-​19 pandemic’. At the same time, Interpol recorded an increase in online child sexual exploitation. They found that increased time spent online by victims and by offenders contributes to the risk of offences taking place, as well as social factors such as boredom possibly leading to risk-​taking behaviour, and economic hardship leading to desperate measures. Global and regional development organizations have also emphasized the risk of increased FGM and child and early marriage during the pandemic. Prior to the onset of the

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pandemic, significant improvements were being made to reduce FGM and child and early marriage in sub-​Saharan Africa. In Malawi, child marriages were annulled in court cases; in Ethiopia, ‘47 per cent of girls aged 15 to 19 years have undergone FGM compared to 75 per cent of women aged 35 to 49 years’ and child marriage has decreased by 18 per cent in a generation (Clarke et al, 2020). This progress is already being reversed. The social isolation, disruption of services, shrinking of civil society space and risk of extreme poverty caused by COVID-​19 policies means that there has already been a rise in cases of FGM in East and West Africa since lockdowns were imposed, and there is a risk that ‘as many as 2 million additional cases of FGM by 2030 that would otherwise have been averted’ will occur in 2021 (Clarke et al, 2020; Orchid Project, 2020). In sub-​Saharan Africa, there can be a relationship between FGM and child and early marriage, because of a belief that cutting increases ‘marriageability’ (Orchid Project, 2020). Girls in West and Central Africa are at especially high risk of child or early marriage. Six of the ten countries with the highest rates of child marriage are located in this region, where between around half and up to three-​quarters of girls are married as children –​Niger (76 per cent), Central African Republic (68 per cent), Chad (67 per cent), Burkina Faso (52 per cent), Mali (52 per cent) and Guinea (51 per cent). The pandemic has exacerbated all of the major drivers of child marriage in this region, including ‘family poverty, barriers for girls staying in or returning to school, the taboo around female sexuality linked to the perceived “shame” of a pregnancy out of wedlock, and limited sexual and reproductive health services and information for girls and young women’ (Plan International and Girls Not Brides, 2020: 2). School closures will also impact on increasing rates of child marriage, as girls who are not in education are more likely to be married. It is estimated that 13 million more child marriages may take place in West and Central Africa by 2030 as a result of the pandemic (Plan International and Girls Not Brides, 2020: 1).

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While six of the world’s worst affected countries are in sub-​ Saharan Africa, three are in Latin America (the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Mexico), a region where child and early marriage is still not recognized as a major problem or taken seriously as a policy issue, and where prevalence rates have not dropped in 30 years (Girls Not Brides, 2020). In Latin America, there is a correlation between the probability of being married or in an early union, and rurality, poverty and lack of access to education (Girls Not Brides, 2020). Early marriage can have devastating consequences on girls and adolescents, in the immediate and long term. Their risk of experiencing gender-​based violence, early pregnancy and associated health complications, and STIs all increase, as do negative education outcomes (PAHO, 2019; Jones et al, 2020). Furthermore, early marriage ‘helps perpetuate cycles of poverty and often has physical, emotional and psychological consequences’ (Girls Not Brides, 2020: 5). Migrant women and girls face extra risks and barriers to sexual and reproductive health2 Additional barriers exist for girls and women on the move in both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. For these groups, accessing appropriate healthcare, including sexual and reproductive healthcare, becomes even more difficult than it was before. There are also heightened risks of sexual violence and exploitation during migration and upon arriving in the new country, as well as the possibility of engaging in consensual but risky sexual activity during migration. Conditions for these women and girls have worsened considerably as a result of COVID-​19 policies, and mitigating policies are lacking. Before the pandemic, barriers for migrant sub-​Saharan and Latin American women accessing healthcare –​including sexual and reproductive and maternal healthcare –​during the migration journey and upon arrival in the new country included legal barriers, such as a lack of documents and

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irregular status; physical barriers, including communication difficulties or not knowing where services were; fear and, without question, racism, xenophobia and stigma (Cotton, 2019; Pérez-​Urdiales et al, 2019; OAS, 2020; REGHID, 2020a). According to Brizuela et al (2021: 402), ‘migrants and refugees are exposed to complex social, ethnic-​based, political and economic hardships that undermine their fundamental right to health and predispose them to immediate disparities in morbidity and mortality’. These barriers to accessing healthcare and other services are particularly worrying given the risk of exposure to sexual violence and exploitation for migrant girls and women. Girls and women on the move in sub-​Saharan Africa are more likely than the static population to experience lifetime sexual violence (Pannetier et al, 2020), and sexual and gender-​based violence is one of the reasons why women and girls flee their home countries in both regions (Fleury, 2016; Brizuela et al, 2021). Many women and girls can only access services from international humanitarian organizations (REGHID, 2020b), many of which unwittingly perpetrate a colonialist and victimizing narrative. The risks of encountering sexual violence increase during the migration journey or upon reaching the destination country. Migrant girls and women are exposed to increased risk in emergency accommodation, in overcrowded homes and on the streets. They are also at risk of being trafficked or exploited by people smugglers. The coyotes who facilitate girls’ and women’s migration journeys in Latin America warn them to carry contraception and emergency contraception, as if this will somehow prepare them for the sexual relations –​ consensual or otherwise –​that they will inevitably experience during their journey. Social distancing and restriction of movement policies during the pandemic have only isolated, stigmatized and left even more vulnerable migrant girls and women in terms of sexual and reproductive health. Pandemics ‘reduce access to sexual and reproductive health services, either because of shortages of

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supplies, medicines and specialist health care workers or because resources are redirected in times of crisis in ways that reflect away the priorities of (generally male) policy makers, rather than the needs of women’ (REGHID, 2020b). For example, in Tapachula, a Mexican border town in the Central America migrant corridor, some hospitals were designated as COVID-​ 19 hospitals, meaning their other services were suspended. The repercussions of this are particularly worrying viewed in the context of increased risk and vulnerabilities faced by migrant girls and women in Tapachula during COVID-​19. During an interview with an NGO in Tapachula, we were told that prostituted and/​or trafficked migrant women and girls had to continue to work during lockdown, and their increased visibility made them easier targets for police and criminal gangs seeking to exploit or abuse them; and that younger women and teenagers were especially vulnerable to grooming and sexual exploitation from older men. The combination of lack of access to health services, sexual abuse and exploitation from state and non-​state actors, and increased desperation influencing more risk-​taking behaviour, ‘has resulted in cases of sexually transmitted infections including HIV rising by 30 per cent among migrant women and girls in Mexico, and the scale of the increase in teenage pregnancies in the same population is “scary”(interview, REGHID). Increased desperation also leaves displaced girls and women even more vulnerable to trafficking into the sex industry than they already were during ‘normal’ times. For example, sex trafficking in the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico, where high numbers of Colombian, Cuban and Venezuelan women are trafficked, rose by 265 per cent in the first six months of 2020 (PorEsto!, 2020). Reproductive needs and rights are not respected International and region-​wide strategies were in place pre-​ pandemic in sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America to protect and advance women and girls’ sexual and reproductive health

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needs and rights. But, at the national level, these are contested and incomplete. Disruptions to sexual and reproductive health services can be attributed to structural problems that pre-​date the pandemic: underfunded health services, lack of prioritization, stigma, and conservative and misogynistic norms. The absence of effective policies to mitigate the problems of access to services that have been caused by the pandemic is indicative of prevailing socio-​cultural and/​or political attitudes that consistently see women’s gendered health rights and needs as non-​essential provision. Sexual and reproductive health provision is, discursively, regarded as essential for development. But delivering these services effectively requires major changes in prioritization. And effective policy-​making in this area also means tackling widespread norms of gender-​based violence. In fact, although violence is often seen as a different field to sexual and reproductive health, it can have important implications for women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health. Acts of violence –​sexual or physical –​towards women and girls can result in permanent health conditions which affect their sexual and reproductive health. Some widely practised and often culturally accepted practices are also recognized as acts of sexual violence against women and girls, in particular, FGM and child or early marriage. For this reason, the African Union Strategy for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment 2018–​2028 captures both gender-​based violence and sexual and reproductive health in Pillar 2: Dignity, security and resilience. It states: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Reproductive Rights link critically with other development enablers and children’s wellbeing. Violence against women and related harmful traditional practices are symptomatic of the accepted social norms in many countries and communities. Human security and bodily integrity for women is critical for the attainment of gender equality. (African Union, nd: 11)

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The same is true of the Maputo Plan of Action 2016–​2030, where states commit to: Sexual and reproductive health policies including continuing to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, infant and child mortality by ending all preventable deaths of mothers, newborns and children, ensuring combating HIV/​AIDS, expanding contraceptive use, reducing levels of unsafe abortion, ending early and forced child marriage, eradicating female genital mutilation and preventing gender-​based violence and ensuring access of adolescents and youth to sexual and reproductive health. (African Union Commission, 2016: 2–​3) In Latin America, the Montevideo Strategy also compels signatory states to guarantee women and girls the: Right to a life free of all forms of violence and discrimination: violence against women in its various manifestations (private, public, symbolic, institutional, cyber, economic, obstetric, political, in armed conflicts, in natural disasters, deprivation of liberty, harassment in the workplace, sexual harassment, sexual abuse and exploitation, migrant smuggling, trafficking in women, forced prostitution, rape, femicide); forced marriage and cohabitation imposed on girls and adolescents. (ECLAC, 2017: 10) The problem is not with recognizing need, then. It is with delivery. During the pandemic, the advice from global and regional development organizations has been clear –​states must prioritize sexual and reproductive healthcare, including safe abortion, and services must remain open and functioning to the best extent that they can, despite extra pressures of treating COVID-​19. Sexual and reproductive health care is ‘time sensitive, lifesaving, critical healthcare’ (Palacio and

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Singh, 2020). Failing this, the WHO recommends ‘prioritising digital health services, self-​care interventions, task sharing and outreach to ensure access to medicines, diagnostics, devices, information and counselling’ (WHO, 2020c: 29). Of course, there are fiscal challenges that affect states’ ability to follow these recommendations. Health systems have been underfunded for years in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. Governments have been advised to protect budgets for sexual and reproductive health services during the pandemic but the fiscal pressures of finding sufficient additional resources to address the pandemic remain. At the same time, we cannot ignore the socio-​cultural and political contexts prior to and during the pandemic, which show that the sexual and reproductive health rights and needs of girls and women are not seen as a priority. Endler et al (2021) found that countries with severe restrictions on abortion were less likely to have adapted sexual and reproductive health service delivery to mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic, suggesting a lack of political will to deal with this issue. And in some countries, there is even evidence of a backlash during the pandemic against gains made by women and girls. In Brazil, where abortion is only permitted if the mother’s life is at risk, if the foetus has anencephaly, or in the case of rape, two civil servants were fired in June 2020 ‘after they signed a technical note recommending that authorities maintain sexual and reproductive health services during the Covid-​19 pandemic, including “safe abortion in the cases permitted by Brazilian law” ’(Human Rights Watch, 2021a). New barriers to accessing legal abortion were also created under President Bolsonaro, with only 42 hospitals in the country performing legal abortions in 2020 (Human Rights Watch, 2021a). In Somalia, where abortion is only permitted to save the mother’s life, the Speaker of the Parliament tabled a new bill in August 2020 which ‘would allow for child marriage by defining a child around physical maturity instead of age, reduce penalties for forced marriage, exclude a broad range of sexual offenses, and

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include weak procedural protections for survivors’ (Human Rights Watch, 2021b). It may not be surprising therefore that it is difficult to find widespread evidence of the implementation of policies under COVID-​19 that explicitly address and prioritize women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health needs. Nevertheless, there are some imaginative services created, some of which could provide the basis for post-​pandemic schemes. In Uganda, an app, SafeBoda, means that users can have contraceptives delivered to their homes (UNFPA, 2020c). In Eswatini, in response to a 47 per cent drop in the use of family planning services, a text messaging service was introduced to remind women that they could access sexual and reproductive health services (UNFPA, 2020b). National guidelines for gender equality were produced in Ecuador, which list sexual and reproductive rights as one of the eight areas of focus (Consejo Nacional Para La Igualdad de Género, 2020). These guidelines clearly recommend the protection of sexual and reproductive health services during the pandemic. In Costa Rica, the government programme which aims to improve outcomes for women in conditions of poverty or social exclusion, ‘Avanzamos Mujeres’, has been adapted to online learning. It includes training on reproductive rights (IMAS, 2020). The limitation of many of these programmes is that they fail explicitly to reach out to the most vulnerable or excluded women and girls, meaning that their coverage is inevitably reduced. But they provide a basis that could be used to strengthen provision, if there is the will on the part of governments to do so. Historical gains for feminist activism Building on and extending these services means working with and listening to feminist organizations. In fact, despite the many challenges presented by the pandemic, feminist activism has not decreased. Some emblematic examples here include the historic victory in Argentina, after five years of arduous activism, on

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30 December 2020 that legalized abortion (Riggirozzi and Grugel, 2021). Meanwhile, in Ecuador, in May 2021, abortion in cases of rape was legalized. In Mexico, in Veracruz, Puebla and Quintana Roo, feminist activists also took steps towards the legalization of abortion. Thanks to feminist efforts in Veracruz, the motion to legalize abortion was taken to the Supreme Court. After it was rejected, feminist collectives in Puebla and Quintana Roo organized sit-​ins at the states’ respective congress buildings to demand that those states’ legislatures debate the motion of legislation, to subsequently take it to the vote. After 25 days, feminists in Puebla left Congress with the promise that the motion would be discussed in April 2021. After 95 days of peaceful protest in Quintana Roo, the motion was discussed and a vote to legalize abortion held in the plenary. Despite a 13–​7 vote against legislation, the Red Feminista Quintanarooense (Quintana Roo Feminist Network, hereafter RFQ) were not deterred; the goal of the sit-​in was primarily to ensure that this debate happened because with it, in the case of a negative vote in the plenary session, the RFQ would be able to file an appeal arguing that Congress acted unconstitutionally by denying women’s rights, and as such the motion would reach Mexico’s Supreme Court. In September 2021, the Supreme Court did indeed rule –​unanimously –​ that criminal penalties for abortion are unconstitutional. This means that abortion has been decriminalized in Mexico; this is a huge win for women’s rights, and an important step forward in achieving legalization across the country. Conclusion Living a life free from gender-​based violence and enjoying autonomy and dignity with regards to sexual and reproductive health are fundamental rights for girls and women. However, guaranteeing these rights through policy, especially for the most marginalized girls and women, has long been problematic in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. That the COVID-​19

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crisis would only exacerbate challenges for girls and women in these areas was clear: sweeping pandemic policy responses in the form of social distancing, isolation, travel bans and curfews along with economic contraction have been deeply damaging to girls and women, yet policies to mitigate these damaging outcomes are scarce. In both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, rates of gender-​based violence and femicide have increased during the pandemic. Overall, the policy response has been disappointing, weak and does not do enough to protect girls and women and punish perpetrators of violence. Ultimately, it does save girls’ and women’s lives, dignity or guarantee their futures. Policies to extend, or even ensure, sexual and reproductive health provision are especially difficult to find. Where gains have been made, it is due to the sustained activism of women’s groups and networks and, in some cases, mass mobilization to demand minimum gender health rights, such as in Argentina and Mexico. As a result, post-​pandemic, coherent and robust policies are urgently required to protect and empower women and girls –​especially the most vulnerable, isolated and excluded. If not, not only will development gains be rolled back, but the hopes, dreams, futures, health and lives of thousands of women and girls will be snatched away.

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FIVE

Exacerbating the Gender Gap: COVID-​19 and Gendered Inequalities in Work and Education

Introduction Writing shortly after the launch of the SDGs as a paradigm for more equitable development, Cornwall and Rivas (2015) identified the urgent need to ensure that the Goals deliver a gender-​transformative agenda of change, going beyond practices simply of ‘inclusion’ and instead taking account of the need to rebalance unequal power relations. This would, they suggested, create ‘a tool for identifying laws, behaviour and institutions in which one class of people are treated differently to others’ (Cornwall and Rivas, 2015: 410). Education and work are essential elements within the package of radical reforms to government policies that would permit the start of a gender-​transformative agenda of equitable development. We therefore explore here how these two critical issue-​areas have fared during the COVID-​19 pandemic. Long-​standing socio-​economic inequalities and gendered social norms have meant that women and girls have faced heightened challenges in finding employment, especially ‘decent work’, outside the home and receiving compensation and respect for unpaid social reproductive work (see Rai et al, 2019 for a discussion of the limitations of the ILO ‘decent work’ agenda in relation to women). Women’s entitlement to work is consistently undermined, in direct contravention

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of SDG 5.5 on women’s right to full participation in society and 5a on women’s right to economic resources. However, this situation has been exacerbated with the arrival of the pandemic where women and girls have taken on increased amounts of unpaid care work in an effort to sustain families and communities because governments are failing to deliver on their promises –​codified in SDG 5.4 –​to recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work by improving public provision and social protection. Meanwhile, the right of girls and women to education –​ SDG 4 and 4.5 on the elimination of gendered inequality in education –​has gone unprotected by governments’ failures to take girls’ experiences into account. Boys and girls experience school very differently. Some girls, especially those from poor families, do not even experience schooling at all, with families choosing to invest in the education of boys before girls (UNICEF, nd). When girls do gain access to schools, keeping them safe remains a challenge that can impede the continuation of their education; failures on issues of safety, dignity and inclusion for girls denies many their right to education. At the root of these challenges is the long-​term failure of governments worldwide to recognize, promote and protect women’s rights and commit to gender equality in the workplace, in the home and in education. In this chapter, we focus on how these long-​term failures have intensified during the COVID-​19 pandemic. We look particularly at the impacts on women who work in un-​ and under-​paid employment, showing how these women have endured heightened risks to their economic security, and argue that government response has been weak and limited. Then we discuss the impact of the pandemic on girls’ education. We recognize that important gains have been made in terms of girls’ access to education in low-​and middle-​income countries over the last 20 years, and ask how far have these gains been undermined by government failures during the pandemic.

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Precarious work and the gendered challenges of COVID-​19 Across the Global South, poor women and girls have fewer opportunities than men to access decent work (SDG 8). According to UN Women (ndc), women are not only paid less than men (with a global pay gap of around 23 per cent), but women are also much more likely to have insecure employment, especially after becoming mothers. This is despite evidence that points clearly to the fact that when women work outside the home, and especially when they are paid a decent wage, economies grow. COVID-​19 has accentuated pre-​existing labour market vulnerabilities for everyone. Working women living in poverty or earning low wages have been hit especially hard. We briefly outline what this means for three categories of women workers: those in the informal sector, those in paid domestic work, and those carrying out unpaid work at home. Of course, women in many cases work across these categories, providing unpaid care in their own homes, paid care (in the majority of cases, on an informal basis) in the homes of others, and earning money in informal employment either in agriculture or the city at different times and life stages. Throughout their lives and no matter their other circumstances, they are highly likely to consistently be carrying out a disproportionate amount of unpaid work at home. Informal women workers

Globally, the ILO estimates that 61 per cent of the total workforce –​around two billion workers –​operates within the informal economy (ILO, 2018a). Informal sector employment is characterized by low pay, high risks, and irregular income and opportunities for work. In the Global South, women make up the vast majority of the proportion of workers in the informal sector. In 2018, more than 90 per cent of informal employment in sub-​Saharan African countries was undertaken by women and in Latin America, the figure is almost 75 per

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cent (ILO, 2019; UK AID, 2020). Women working informally receive, on average, lower wages than their male counterparts (ILO, 2019). Furthermore, these women, working in small subsistence businesses and in paid domestic work, often fall outside the frameworks of formal social protection measures. In Latin America, the ILO estimated that between 2005 and 2015 only 45.3 per cent of all women were covered by contributory social security (ILO, 2020b). In some countries (in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) where they are included, for example through conditional cash transfers, they are included not as workers but as mothers with family responsibilities (CARE International, 2011). That is, they receive income because of their family, not their work-​based responsibilities; this creates additional burdens for women and devalues or does not recognize the informal work that they carry out (Molyneux, 2006). Pandemics always hit the informal sector hard. Informal sector workers find themselves without income in situations of lockdown and with greatly reduced income because of restrictive government policies. Examples across sub-​Saharan African countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda have proved this to be the case during the current pandemic, too (Megersa, 2020). The UN Roadmap for Covid-​19 Recovery (United Nations, 2020b: 50) highlights the extent of these risks to female informal sector workers and recognizes that the lack of employment security is at the root of the vulnerability women face. As well as faring worse, evidence from previous pandemics shows that risks to women’s employment continues for longer than men’s. This was laid bare during the 2013–​2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. During the Ebola pandemic, informal women workers, especially market traders, endured higher levels of unemployment than men and once the crisis subsided, it took much longer for women to re-​enter the workforce. In post-​Ebola Liberia unemployment reached 56.2 per cent, showing an increase from 18.8 per cent pre-​pandemic, with women making up the largest proportion of this increase (Barlow et al, 2020).

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Donors are certainly aware of these risks. As part of its 2017 Economic Development Strategy, the UK DFID, now part of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, highlighted the need for coordinated action that addresses gendered inequalities in informal work (DFID, 2017). Poverty and inequality can only be reduced by both raising the earnings and lowering the risks of these workers. Not all workers in the informal economy are poor, but the poor face higher rates of informal employment, and poverty rates are higher among informal workers: as the ILO put it, ‘poverty is both a cause and consequence of informality’ (ILO, 2018b). The transition to the formal economy is a condition of achieving decent work for all, or of meeting SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) (ILO, 2018a). However, this challenge is multifaceted. It requires concrete action to change labour markets, employment practice and labour law, along with steps by states to change the normative frameworks that uphold gender inequalities in the household.1 From the start of the COVID-​19 pandemic, the World Bank and the IMF emphasized the need to take the structural gender inequalities experienced by female informal sector workers seriously, if only for reasons of public health (see World Bank, 2020b). But, during the first month of the pandemic in 2020, many of the virus containment measures adopted by governments closed down public spaces and forced informal workers out of their workplace. This was accompanied by decreasing demand for their services, rising costs of inputs, an inability to access markets and an increase in childcare responsibilities (OECD, 2020c; WIEGO, 2020). As a consequence, the earnings of informal workers in Africa declined by more than 80 per cent (Gates Foundation, 2020). Paid domestic workers

Domestic work creates the space and opportunities to make all other jobs possible, while simultaneously guaranteeing the

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care and wellbeing of families and loved ones (Slaughter, 2016). Domestic work (cleaning, cooking and caring for dependent members of the family) is generally assumed to be the responsibility of women and girls within their own households, but in some cases, especially in families with the financial resources to monetarize domestic labour, it is carried out by live-​in and live-​out paid workers. Just like unpaid domestic work, paid domestic work is feminized, with UNICEF and the ILO estimating that 70.2 per cent of domestic workers globally are women (ILO, 2019). We know little about how extensive paid domestic work is for girls under the age of 18; however, the lack of control over their lives and working environment is likely to be even more acute, and their vulnerability to abuse by their employers greater (DNI COSTA RICA, 2002). Anderson (2001) estimated that paid domestic work almost certainly constitutes the largest sector of female employment globally. For example, up to 20 per cent of all women in Chile and Ecuador are employed in paid domestic work, and opportunities to work as paid maids, nannies and cleaners are one of the primary drivers of female international migration (Donato et al, 2011). Many, though not all, paid domestic workers work informally. In Latin America, the ILO estimated that in 2016, 77.5 per cent of those engaged in paid domestic work were employed informally (ILO, 2018b). In Argentina, 95 per cent of all work that is carried out in a domestic work context is informal (ILO, 2020c). Paid domestic work is different from unpaid social reproductive work not only because it is carried out by someone else from outside the home, but because it is a job where standards are high and, at the same time, uncertain (frequently, domestic workers are required to keep houses cleaner than their employers would, cook more elaborate meals, etc) and employer demands are unregulated. Relationships between employer and employee are informed by hierarchical relations of class, race or ethnicity, and misogyny –​even when employer and employee are both women. Especially for

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migrant, Indigenous and Black domestic workers, degradation easily becomes part of the unwritten work contract (D’Souza, 2010). Employers may hold onto migrant workers’ passports and travel documents, rarely formalize working hours, or pay insurance. Even in cases where employers provide gifts, exercise kindness and consider the domestic worker ‘one of the family’, the conditions of decent work are rarely met, because social, health and labour protection are lacking. Domestic workers are particularly vulnerable in countries which have still not ratified ILO Convention 189 on domestic work (ILO, 2011). While the majority of Latin American countries have fully ratified the Domestic Workers Convention, many other regions lag behind. In sub-​Saharan (and Northern) Africa, the contrast couldn’t be starker: at the time of writing, South Africa and Namibia were the only countries in the whole African continent which had ratified Convention 189 (ILO, nd). However, as we show in the following section, this Convention has offered little job protection during COVID-​19. COVID-​19 quickly intensified the vulnerabilities that domestic workers face. Research and testimony from domestic workers’ unions across Latin America suggest that many domestic workers were dismissed without pay or redundancy during lockdowns, leaving them without access to income or health coverage. The UN estimates that 72 per cent of domestic workers lost their jobs since the start of the pandemic (UN Women, 2020a). In South Africa, for example, the number of domestic workers pre-​pandemic was recorded at over one million (Government of South Africa, 2020). A quarter of these jobs were lost during the first three months of lockdown (April–​June 2020) (Damons, 2020). The gross inequality domestic workers have faced is evidenced by the fact that while 250,000 domestic workers (mainly women) in South Africa lost their jobs and only 0.6 per cent continued to be employed and allowed to remain at home, 44.7 per cent of professional workers and 40.6 per cent of managers were able to work from home on full pay (Businesstech, 2020).

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Others have found themselves under pressure to continue working, making hazardous trips in unsafe conditions and working in risky environments. In Brazil, one of the first people to die from COVID-​19 in Brazil was a domestic worker, Cleonice Gonçalves: a black woman, aged 63, diabetic, living in the city of Miguel Pereira in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Her employer, a resident of the upper-​class area of Leblon, had just returned from a trip to Italy and did not inform her employee that she had been contaminated. One survived, the other did not. (Acciari, 2020: 121) Unpaid domestic and care work

Almost all women and girls, except the very young and very privileged, carry out unpaid domestic and care work, or social reproductive work. Many do it alongside formal and informal employment, including carrying out similar duties as paid domestic workers. Gendered inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work are at the heart of the sexual division of labour (Rai et al, 2019). There is not a region or country on the planet where women do less unpaid care work than men, and historic attempts to redress the gendered gap in this area have yielded only limited progress and at a very slow pace. Evidence from across 25 countries with comparable data over a 15-​year timespan (1998–​2012) shows just how slow this progress is: in this period, women’s time spent on unpaid care reduced by only 3 per cent or 10 minutes per day (276–​266), whereas men increased their share of unpaid work by 11 per cent or 13 minutes (115–​128). At the end of this 15-​year period, women were still responsible for carrying out 68 per cent of unpaid care. Globally, in 2019, it was estimated that women undertook 75 per cent of unpaid care work duties (ILO, 2019). This inequality is highlighted by the length of time that women spend carrying out unpaid care work versus

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that of men, daily. ILO data lays bare the scale of this inequality in care provision across the Global South. For example, in pre-​pandemic Ethiopia, women were providing on average 4.9 hours of care each day whereas men were providing 2.2 (Owino, 2021); in Mexico, women provided 6.6 hours while men provided 2.7 hours. This pattern is one that unfortunately plays out in every country that the ILO provided data for in its 2019 report (Charmes, 2019). Governments and international organizations have consistently failed to acknowledge the contribution that social reproductive labour makes to the wider economy. However, they are not the only ones. When the World Bank fails to include unpaid care work in economic production data, it invisibilizes and under-​values the work of millions of women, whose work creates the foundations for economic production –​ as we currently understand and value it –​to take place. Yet unpaid care work is indispensable to economies, societies and human wellbeing (Dugarova, 2020). Women’s unpaid contribution to healthcare alone equates to US$1.5 trillion or 2.35 per cent of global GDP, and when women’s contribution to all types of care is taken into account, this figure reaches US$11 trillion (Staab, 2020). The amount of unpaid care work women and girls are expected to carry out has increased exponentially during the COVID-​19 pandemic, along with the socio-​economic and health risks that carrying out this work entails for women and girls. Household confinements and the social distancing measures that formed part of national or regional lockdowns led to a significant reduction of formal (care and education centres, care centres for people in dependent situations, paid domestic work) and informal (support for families, neighbours, etc) care arrangements (ECLAC, 2020f: 10). Closures of schools, the need to provide care for ill family members and the isolation of older relatives all created additional stresses. The World Bank predicted that women would have to leave formal sector jobs in order to meet additional care demands at

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home, with the prospect of long-​term negative consequences on women’s participation in the labour market (Grown and Sánchez-​Páramo, 2020). In this very direct sense, as Power (2020: 68) argues, the pandemic has been ‘gender regressive’. As ECLAC has argued in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean, the crisis has demonstrated the unsustainable nature of the current social organization of the care sector, as well as intensifying existing economic and gender inequalities, with the poorest women bearing the heaviest burden of unpaid care work and the greatest livelihood losses (ECLAC, 2020f: 4). The crisis has brought increased requirements for enhanced hygiene and care in the home, which creates even more household work, and is especially burdensome in low-​income households. UN Women highlight that with four billion people lacking access to sanitation facilities, and three billion lacking access to clean water and soap in the home, the burden on women and girls who are tasked with water collection in low-​income countries –​in addition to other work –​has grown (UN Women, 2020d; focus group interview, World Vision, 24 August 2020). Government responses: how far have they protected vulnerable women workers? According to the World Bank, by mid-​A ugust 2020, 200 countries had expanded or created social protection or employment measures in response to the pandemic. However, these policies have fallen far short of protecting vulnerable women workers, particularly in low-​and middle-​ income countries. In the initial aftermath of the crisis, in early 2020, across 21 Latin American countries, governments responded to the social crisis with 37 new cash transfer policies, 20 expanded policies and five adapted policies (ECLAC, 2020a). However, coverage of these policies was too low, with many in need excluded. At the same time, the policies are fiscally unsustainable;

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governments would not be able to continue them for long without causing further damage to the economy. In some cases, policies were allocated on a household basis and were not gender-​sensitive, which have meant that they have exacerbated inequalities in the home (ECLAC, 2020a). Delivery of cash transfers to families has also been stymied by the fact that the scale of informal sector employment is difficult to gauge and respond to. Some governments, nevertheless, have factored informality into their response, at least to some extent. In Latin America, some of the packages of emergency measures that were implemented to cushion the first economic impacts of lockdowns recognized that informal workers were particularly vulnerable. Argentina was a frontrunner here, with a programme that enabled informal workers to access lump payments in April 2020 equivalent to US$160 through the Family Emergency Income programme –​though the programme did not specifically support female informal workers (ECLAC, 2020a). In Colombia, the government initially committed US$120 million to support the estimated three million informal economy workers, again without additional support for women workers, through the expansion of the Families in Action programme, a monthly cash transfer programme reaching approximately 2.6 million recipients who would receive an additional payment of US$80. In addition, in Bogota, local authorities have provided food parcels to the 53,000 registered street vendors, men and women (Maloney, 2020). However, in some cases the conditions attached to new programmes have meant that some of those most in need have been excluded from provision. For example, in Peru, although an emergency grant of US$110 was available for the first 15 days after the lockdown to enable families to adjust to the state of emergency, it was only available to new claimants. This effectively excluded most informal workers, many of whom were already part of social provision but who had lost their entire income overnight (WIEGO, 2020).

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In sub-​Saharan Africa, the picture was somewhat different. In the first place, lockdowns were slow to come in. High levels of poverty and of informality, as well as a real threat of exacerbating hunger, meant that in some countries like Tanzania, national lockdowns were avoided and lesser targeted restrictions put in place, such as closing schools. In others, like Malawi, the high court suspended the planned lockdown (18 April to 9 May 2020) because the government had not put in place sufficient measures to cushion the poor from the economic cost (Global Legal Monitor, 2020). Eventually, the Malawian government secured a US$37 million loan to (re)distribute the equivalent of US$40 per month to each household (equivalent of the monthly minimum wage) to offset the restrictions that were implemented, in place of a full lockdown. By the end of April 2020, only eight countries in sub-​Saharan Africa had implemented any additional social protection measures for informal workers. Of these countries, only Burkina Faso specifically targeted women through a US$8.3 million fund that was aimed to ameliorate the situation of (mainly) women fruit and vegetable traders. Other countries recognized mothers with additional one-​off grants (US$27) applied to existing child support programmes, such as in South Africa, added to a universal COVID-​19 payment of US$19 per person for a period of six months. Other countries concentrated on food package provision (Cape Verde) and increased provision of sanitation (Rwanda). Overall, though, policies fell far short of meeting gendered economic need (WIEGO, 2020). Women working as market traders have fared particularly badly, according to the World Bank, especially those that are cross-​border traders, along with women who are smallholder farmers (World Bank, 2020b). This is due to a decline in food and crop production, closed borders and the inevitable hikes in food prices. These difficulties may impact on women’s capacity to recover their place in the local economy afterwards, according to the Chair of an East African regional trade group.

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Women run the risk of being displaced from markets by men who, they argue, operate more effectively in unregulated market situations such as the ones now emerging thanks to the COVID-​19 chaos (anonymized interview, Trademark, 4 August 2020). One aspect of government responses demands some additional analysis. Attempts to get funding out quickly to those in need during the pandemic seem to have increased reliance on digital mobile platforms for the delivery of welfare (Bull et al, 2020). This approach has long been championed by development banks and multilateral institutions because it seems to offer the opportunity of enabling transfers quickly and, it is suggested, reduce corruption (Bull et al, 2020). But there is also a real risk of excluding women through reliance on digital transfers. In many countries in the Global South, women face structural and long-​standing barriers to banks and are precluded from opening accounts in their own name by discriminatory practices, a lack of formal documentation, male bias within the banking system, insufficient funds and social norms that in many cases restrict women’s work outside the home (Hendriks, 2019). Of the 1.7 billion people excluded in 2017, 56 per cent were women, the majority of whom were in the Global South (Hendriks, 2019). The World Bank and the Gates Foundation have highlighted the additional challenges that COVID-​19 presents to low-​ income women in accessing welfare support, especially if they live in remote areas with limited connectivity, or those who have low digital literacy (Bull et al, 2020). But concerns about the trend to digital payments under COVID-​19 go wider than problems of financial inclusion. In some cases, payments to families are made to male household heads, reducing women’s access to the payments. ActionAid (Ethiopia) highlighted the way this was reducing poor women’s capacity to get by and look after their families and suggested that a return to cash payments would work better for women:

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It [physical cash transfers] is one of the best approaches to support women in the informal sector, to make them more resilient to the impacts of Covid-​19, especially for women living in cities. We at ActionAid prefer that as a modality. It gives women much more freedom and purchasing capacity, it helps at a family level. It is not restrictive. Cash is the best way of supporting women in cities, and it is essential for scenarios where there are displaced or mobile groups of women. We at ActionAid along with other NGOs are advocating for cash for women who reside in Addis Ababa. (Anonymized interview, ActionAid, 28 July 2020) When we turn our attention to policies that governments have implemented to address the heightened challenges of caregiving, we discover that while there have been some, these have fallen short of addressing that the problem is gendered, and women have been left with less support than they need. Throughout Latin America there have been policies implemented in the areas of: financial support and cash transfers (4); paid domestic workers’ rights (4); exemptions to curtailed movement (1); disability support (1); continued services (1); and licences and permits (4) (ECLAC, 2020a). However, none of these policies were explicitly gender-​specific. Argentina was by far the most responsive to caregiving challenges and implemented policies in all but two of these categories, but still, they represent only a fraction of the social protection and labour market measures that have been implemented (UN Women and Women Count, nd). That said, there were five countries (Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico and Dominican Republic) that implemented awareness campaigns promoting co-​responsibilities in the home which sought to redistribute some of the burden that was placed on women by the pandemic (ECLAC, 2020f). Latin America is not an exception in the exacerbation of this gendered care gap, in sub-​Saharan African countries women are also shouldering

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the brunt of additional care responsibilities brought on by the pandemic. COVID-​19: barriers to girls’ education Education is, at least in theory, one of the few routes out of poverty available to poor girls and women. Disrupting girls’ education for up to two years, as the COVID-​19 pandemic has done, will have long-​lasting impacts on women’s livelihoods and living standards. Even before COVID-​19, the UN was anxiously drawing attention to the slow pace of progress towards inclusive and equitable education (SDG 4), with estimates that 200 million children would still be out of school by 2030. With the onset of the pandemic, school closures meant that 90 per cent of all students were out of school across the world, for differing amounts of time, reversing years of (albeit limited) progress towards universal education. Crucially, schools do not only provide education. They can serve as safe places for children, and for many provide their only secure source of nutrition every day. The difficulties poor girls face to education are even greater than those of boys. There are substantial barriers before girls even enter schools: discriminatory gender norms deny girls access to schools and learning while families with limited resources may choose to support boys through education rather than girls (UNICEF, nd). Once girls are in education, they face greater challenges to completing their education. It is not only poverty that impedes girls’ education; child labour, gender-​based violence, teenage pregnancies and child marriages in many cases exclude girls from continuing in school (UNICEF, nd). The scale of this problem represents a monumental challenge for countries across the Global South, with UNICEF estimating that over 132 million girls were out of school pre-​pandemic (UNICEF, nd). COVID-​19 has only added to the challenges that girls face in accessing education, meaning that the pandemic has heightened gendered inequalities in education.

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For children from the poorest 20 per cent of households in low-​income countries, school closures represented much more than a loss of schooling. For these children, the option of online learning was entirely unrealistic. There is a lack of equipment, of digital platforms, and in some cases, even of electricity. This is estimated to be the picture for 500 million students (UNDESA, 2020b). Our interviews with local stakeholders in sub-​Saharan Africa suggest that the physical barriers to continuing education –​computers, connectivity and electricity –​were experienced in particularly intense ways by girls (anonymized interview, African Union, 10 August 2020). Within households, boys’ access to the resources for at-​home education is likely to be prioritized. Girls face an added care burden as soon as they are in the home, which will be exacerbated if senior female family members succumb to the virus. Certainly, evidence from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea from the 2014 Ebola outbreak points clearly in this direction, with many not returning to school (Plan International, 2021). Figures from the World Bank showed that post-​Ebola, girls in Sierra Leone were 16 per cent less likely to return to school when they re-​opened, and 19 per cent more likely to turn to work means (Goldstein, 2019). This situation is already playing out across sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America with the governments of South Africa and Peru reporting that 300,000 students (primary and basic and higher education respectively) had not returned to school following school closures in 2020 (Evans et al, 2021). In Kenya, in January 2021, the government reported that the first day of school saw just 70 per cent of learners returning, with girls making up the majority of this shortfall (Kimunge et al, 2020). Schools can be important in keeping girls safe; according to a representative from the African Union, ‘in schools [girls] are safe, they are protected, without schools, vulnerabilities increase’ (African Union, 2020b; anonymized interview, African Union, 10 August 2020). There is evidence that teenage pregnancies are increasing as a result of lockdown, in

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some instances by up to 65 per cent (World Vision, 2020). A report by World Vision in late 2020 highlights that teenage pregnancies and policies which ban pregnant girls and young mothers from attending school may mean that one million girls in sub-​Saharan Africa will be blocked from returning to school after the pandemic (World Vision, 2020). World Vision estimates that if countries across sub-​Saharan Africa deny education to adolescent mothers, the economic costs will be in the region of a US$10 billion loss in GDP. In schools, girls are ‘safe’ not just from early pregnancy but also from early marriage. There are real concerns that parents are encouraging early marriage as a way of coping with the economic stresses of the pandemic: ‘the lockdown is impacting on informal work where people work that day to earn money to eat that day. Therefore, parents are marrying off girls younger to relieve the financial burden –​they are unable to feed them. Getting these girls back into education will be a big challenge’ (anonymized interview, African Union, 10 August 2020). In Latin America, meanwhile, children have lost on average four times more days of education (174) than in other regions because of the severity of the pandemic (UNICEF, 2020c). Over 154 million children, about 95 per cent of those enrolled, were temporarily out of school (UNICEF, 2020a). As with school closures in sub-​Saharan Africa, the costs are felt by the most vulnerable children. As well as losing a potentially safe place, they also miss out in terms of loss of meals, water, sanitation and hygiene, and psychosocial support. Since the outbreak, more than 80 million children have stopped receiving hot meals across the region (UNICEF, 2020a). Girls, as well as disabled children, Indigenous and refugee or migrant learners, are particularly adversely affected (UNICEF, 2020c). Conclusion Work and education are essential elements of any gender-​ transformative agenda (Cornwall and Rivas, 2015). However,

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during the COVID-​19 pandemic, work and education are two areas where there have been wasted opportunities by governments to protect the rights of women and girls, which has detrimentally affected their wellbeing and in many cases put their lives at risk. While the impacts of COVID-​19 are wide-​reaching, they are not affecting all groups of people equally. In work and education, the pandemic has exposed pre-​existing structural gendered inequalities and has placed the heaviest burden upon those who were already vulnerable. Informal women workers have been disproportionately negatively affected by the economic fallout from the lockdowns that have been implemented throughout sub-​Saharan Africa and Latin America. These lockdowns have highlighted the high prevalence of women who work to earn money for their families to eat that day, but whose work is not officially recognized by governments, even in cases where the informal sector represents a large proportion of national output. Because their work is not recognized, they have no state protection or security in the event that they are not able to carry out their work. Furthermore, past pandemic responses have shown that when trying to re-​enter the workforce, whether informal or formal, women are more likely to face a more protracted period of unemployment. Governments across both regions have so far failed to step up to the scale of the gendered challenge by seemingly not taking the wellbeing of working women seriously enough, which does not bode well for the recovery phase. The enhanced challenges that informal women workers face during the COVID-​19 pandemic have manifested in a number of ways. First, the temporary prohibition of major economic activities and stay at home orders have presented major barriers to women making a living in areas such as market trading, hospitality and paid domestic work. Second, insufficient social welfare responses have meant that many are unable to bridge the financial gap that the pandemic has created, leading women and their families into deeper poverty. Third, insufficient social

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responses have meant that many women and girls are being forced to take risks with their health, if their only option is to continue working in dangerous conditions, or go hungry. Finally, the health emergency as well as closures of schools that accompanied the lockdowns has meant that in many cases the unpaid care responsibilities already disproportionately falling to women and girls have increased. Moreover, school closures have exacerbated gender-​based threats to girls. Schools are much more than educational facilities; often, they are safe spaces where children are protected. For example, being in school can reduce the risks for girls becoming pregnant. Already, increases in teenage pregnancies have precluded thousands of girls from returning to schools across sub-​Saharan Africa. This will detrimentally impact them for the rest of their lives. Other families do not have the financial capacity for girls to return to school, and they therefore begin to work prematurely. Furthermore, there is extra risk that girls will be married off by parents unable to afford the additional cost of feeding girls who are at home while schools are closed, and income has been lost. This also highlights worries about the nourishment of children who are out of school. Within all of these challenges, intersectional characteristics make some girls more vulnerable than others. Displaced, disabled and Indigenous and Black girls all face even more barriers to their right to an education, an area of inequality that was already prevalent before the pandemic, and which has been exacerbated by it. COVID-​19 has shone a light on the multifaceted ways in which girls’ right to education and women’s and girls’ right to work are negatively impacted, but it has also highlighted missed opportunities by governments to step up to try and address some of these long-​standing gendered development challenges.

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Conclusion COVID-​19 has presented the greatest test to national health systems and the provision of international public health for over a hundred years. According to Johns Hopkins University (2021), as of 17 October 2021, it has caused 4,896 million deaths globally; we do not yet know the numbers, which will run to millions, of people affected by the long-​term physical and socio-​economic consequences of the virus. Two years since COVID-​19 was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, this health crisis is far from over. Moreover, as we have shown here, COVID-​19 is not just a global health crisis. It is a gendered crisis of governance, equity and development. The pandemic has exposed the gendered social, economic and cultural fault lines of inequality within and between countries. These inequalities manifest through health inequalities –​or the ‘avoidable, unfair and systematic differences in health between different groups of people’, according to Williams et al (2020). As we show in Chapter One, gender is one of the most significant determinants in shaping unequal health outcomes, and how gender intersects with race and ethnicity, age, dis/​ability, sexuality, migrant status, geography and –​above all –​poverty, exacerbates risk for many groups of women. COVID-​19 has revealed the profound weaknesses in our governance systems at international and national levels. At the international level, since 1989, efforts have been made to construct a liberal system of global governance, based on a somewhat contradictory mix of systems that seek to balance markets versus regulation; Western-​inspired values of human rights versus power politics; nationalism versus globalization; rhetorical commitments to diversity versus practices of institutionalized racism, ableism and misogyny, and citizenship versus exclusion. Global development has proved one of the

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major sites of conflict within those cleavages. The articulation of a (weak) global plan for more equitable and sustainable development came together in 2015 through the SDGs. This was the first agenda for international development based not on the principles of economic growth, but on the importance of people (Hulme, 2010; Hulme and Scott, 2010), and it reflected the trend that associated development with civil society, partnership, the promotion of human rights and the adoption of pro-​democratic norms (Welzel et al, 2003). Within this approach, gender equality was one of the fundamental indicators in defining what ‘development’ should look like in the future. It is clear from the evidence we have presented in this book that, so far, this liberal framework for development has not been able to withstand the onslaught wrought by the COVID-​19 pandemic. As we discuss in Chapter Two, the idea of development underpinned by equity and human rights has consistently faltered in the face of the deepening of financialization and the privatization of wealth. Even before the pandemic, global development initiatives were moving far too slowly to effectively address gendered and intersectional inequalities. During the pandemic, these pre-​ existing gender inequalities have been exacerbated, yet little has been done to mitigate the devastating impacts of social distancing policies and economic contraction on the world’s poorest women and girls –​who are also often dealing with other axes of discrimination due to their race or ethnicity, religion, dis/​ability, age, sexuality, migrant status and, above all, their social class. We are not at the end of the havoc wreaked on global development by COVID-​19; yet the question has been posed since the very early days of the pandemic as to whether it can act as a turning point. Will the pandemic cause policy-​makers to see the need for –​and then, create –​a more equitable future for women and girls? Can we truly build back better when we exit this crisis? Unfortunately, based on the findings from the

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first 18 months or so of the pandemic, we fear that in many ways, this is already a missed opportunity. If it is not quickly reversed, this missed opportunity will translate directly into lives lost or changed forever. There will be more victims of femicide; girls’ and women’s physical and mental health will be profoundly affected long term by gender-​ based and/​or sexual violence, and depletion will intensify with increased caring responsibilities; there will be more early pregnancies and child marriages taking place in the shadow of the pandemic. These will have lifelong impacts on girls’ ability to achieve their full potential in education, employment and as women in their own right. These challenges for individual women and girls also mean huge challenges to development. Millions more people will fall into poverty, and progress towards the SDGs will be rolled back even more. But there is also a huge amount of research and evidence-​ informed feminist plans, or at least plans that take gender seriously, that consciously seek to move us out of the pandemic and into a more equitable future for people of all genders, especially women. Policy-​makers could take heed of this evidence and advice and work with experts and civil society groups, many of whom are independent of government responsibilities, to make the deep-​seated changes that are urgently needed. To conclude this book, therefore, we want to summarize the most significant our findings. We do so in order to both highlight the gendered development challenges that have been exacerbated by COVID-​19, and to contribute to the debate on how policies in the future can best protect and promote the rights of women and girls as we move out of, and beyond, this crisis. COVID-​19 has exacerbated pre-​existing inequalities and provoked new challenges Gender-​based violence, femicide and problems related to sexual and reproductive health were major threats to women’s

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health and wellbeing before the pandemic, in part because they were also areas where comprehensive and effective policy were lacking. The response to COVID-​19 has increased these risks. Gender-​based violence has increased because of an intensification of triggers such as stress and economic tension; exacerbating these risks, girls and women were isolated with their aggressors due to curfews and lockdowns, a lack of pre-​ existing services and saturation or closure of those that did exist, and the curtailing of informal networks of support. At first, it appeared that governments might take the threat of gender-​based violence relatively seriously. Every country in Latin America implemented at least one policy related to gender-​based violence, and while in sub-​Saharan Africa there were substantially fewer policies, gender-​based violence still remained the area where the most gender-​sensitive policies were implemented (UNDP, 2020b, 2020c). However, an analysis of these policies shows their limitations and the waning of government capacity and commitment to addressing this issue. Overwhelmingly, the policies focused on increasing information or access to helplines: this is limited in impact and in potential to save lives, if after seeking this information or support, there are no safe spaces for survivors to seek refuge and impunity for perpetrators remains at shockingly high levels. Sexual and reproductive health was also a challenging area for women and girls during the pandemic, due to the combination of economic and social conditions created by the pandemic that placed them in isolated and vulnerable situations, and the lack of policies to mitigate this. Risks of sexual violence and associated health problems increased –​this violence includes abuse and rape, as well as FGM and child or early marriage. Other reproductive health risks also increased, such as contracting sexually transmitted infections including HIV/​ AIDS, and more limited access to contraception, maternal and newborn health services, and abortion services. Access to services was sparse and varied within the regions before the pandemic, largely to do with global and national religious,

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moral and political bargaining. The same biases that restricted girls’ and women’s access to these essential services continued throughout the pandemic, and some countries –​we highlighted examples in Brazil and Somalia –​restricted women and girls’ reproductive rights even further during the pandemic. Added to these gender-​based challenges to women and girls’ physical autonomy and dignity, there were also other significant challenges to their economic, labour and education rights. These were largely borne out of pre-​existing situations like long-​standing socio-​economic inequalities and gendered social norms, as well as male bias in the traditional economy. Although we have dealt with these areas separately in this book, in truth, they are all interlinked. Our analysis shows just how multifaceted risks have been and remain to women and girls. Women, especially disabled, older, migrant, Indigenous and Black women, make up a higher proportion of workers in the informal economy than men. Before the crisis, these workers were already unprotected and unrecognized by governments; the pandemic only exacerbated the precarity and riskiness of informal workers’ labour. Social welfare responses to cushion the fallout of these limitations have been severely lacking. Poverty was already gendered, and it is set to get worse for women and girls, especially if patterns from earlier crises play out here too, where women take longer to re-​enter the workforce than men. Women and girls’ labour is not limited to paid work. Before the pandemic, globally, women and girls carried out around 75 per cent of unpaid labour in the home. During the pandemic, the concentration of all activities into the home, combined with increased pressure to carry out healthcare within the home, increased the intensity of women’s unpaid labour and by extension the depletion they experienced. Unpaid care has been at the edge of the development agenda for at least 50 years, yet it remains excluded from GDP, and the definitions of economy outlined by patriarchal organizations.

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In many parts of the world, before the pandemic, education for girls was already more precarious than it was for boys. Globally, fewer girls than boys are in school. Poverty is a major determinant of how likely it is that girls are in formal education: ‘in sub-​Saharan Africa, just 13 per cent of children from the poorest families complete lower secondary school compared to 66 per cent for the wealthiest’ (Guyatt, 2019). Yet it is precisely for the poorest and most vulnerable girls that schools can make the biggest difference. In addition to learning, schools can be safe places for girls, limiting the risk of underage pregnancy or marriage, keeping them from carrying out child labour, and giving them a break from the caring or social reproductive responsibilities they may have in the home. The difference between how many girls compared to boys have stayed in education during the pandemic is especially stark in sub-​Saharan Africa. In Latin America, girls from Indigenous communities face more barriers than other girls to completing their formal education (Guyatt, 2019). Poverty and gender intersect to impact girls’ education in multiple ways –​girls may not be in school because boys’ education is prioritized in families, or they need to work outside the home, take on caring responsibilities, or they may be married off. With millions more people set to fall into poverty and extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic, it is right to be concerned about what will happen to girls now and in the future. None of this was a surprise We argue in this book that the worst impacts of COVID-​19 could have been avoided by better policy-​making. By ‘better’ here, we principally mean governments showing a much greater willingness to act quickly to protect and advance the rights of the most vulnerable women and girls. Further, we suggest that poor policy-​making was not the consequence of a lack of comprehension of the unequal impact that measures taken to combat COVID-​19 would have. There were, as we have

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shown, plenty of analyses that explicitly outlined the gendered costs that would result from standard pandemic responses –​and these were easily accessible within the public and policy-​making domains. Instead, we argue that the reason that policy has not adequately protected girls and women lies in a combination of embedded gendered biases within governments and governing institutions, along with profound, gendered fiscal limitations that impeded progressive action. As such, we concur with Lupien et al (2021: 299), who wrote with regard to the failure of COVID-​19 policies in Latin America that: decision-​makers and bureaucrats … are influenced and constrained by their countries’ institutions. Overall, Latin American political institutions tend to reproduce inequality and maintain the status quo. Even during a global pandemic, the measures they adopt reflect these deeply entrenched patterns. Social protection and health policy in 2020 reinforced and reproduced the unequal power dynamic and distribution of resources that characterize the region. Experts from international and regional organizations, and from civil society and community organizations, issued early warnings that unless measures were taken to consciously and conspicuously protect the rights of women and girls, their health, education, wellbeing, employment, income and indeed their lives would suffer. The situation we find ourselves in today was a crisis foretold, by experts, researchers and activists at the global, regional, national and local level. As early as March and April 2020 research, reports and policy documents were already being produced which forewarned policy-​makers of what was inevitably to come for girls and women. Some of this knowledge was informed by early learning from the pandemic impacts in China in December 2019, and from earlier health crises like Ebola and Zika. Other reports predicted the impacts based on an understanding of the

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institutional and financial matrix in Latin America and sub-​ Saharan Africa. In China, domestic violence increased during the lockdowns imposed at the start of the pandemic, leading experts to predict that this would be repeated elsewhere as other countries implemented the same measures. Meanwhile, looking back to the recent past, girls’ and women’s access to sexual and reproductive healthcare was curtailed drastically during the Zika and Ebola outbreaks, leading to an increase in maternal and newborn deaths in some countries, and increases in unsafe abortion in others. Even outside of crisis contexts, as Lupien et al (2021) show for Latin America, the pre-​pandemic policy-​making environment was not designed to take the needs of women, girls and other vulnerable groups sufficiently into account. Combating COVID-​19 and its fallout would require dramatically new ways of doing politics which, sadly, did not materialize. As the pandemic raged, feminist researchers and civil society continued to raise awareness about the situation that the most vulnerable girls and women were being subjected to as a result of at best lacking, and at worst, harmful policies. Research at the Johns Hopkins University through the Gender and Covid-​ 19 Working Group (2020) synthesized the wealth of expert research being carried out across the world on local, national and regional level experience and response to the pandemic from a gender perspective. The intention of this work is explicitly to reach policy-​makers. Feminist development organizations like AWID exposed the institutional roots of gender inequality and provided recommendations for innovative and radical approaches to overhaul these. Global and regional development organizations like UN Women, the UNDP and ECLAC consistently provided data in real time to help us understand the effects and content of policy responses to COVID-​19 from a gender perspective. The level of data, discussion and response from a gender perspective is perhaps unlike any we have seen before in previous crisis situations. There was no excuse not to create effective gender policies.

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What explains gender-​inequitable policy responses to COVID-​19? A full explanation of why governments have failed to adequately protect women and girls from the multiple consequences of COVID-​19 requires a deep and detailed analysis of bias and discrimination in global and national politics and how these manifest in critical issue-​areas such as health, labour, finance, education and social care, and the widespread, sometimes unconscious, misogyny that underpins gendered inequities. We have presented in this book evidence for the tragic consequences of these biases. We began at the global level with an analysis of the treatment of gender within global development organizations and within the institutions which control the global political economy. Global development organizations are ‘the pillars of the international system’ that play leading roles in defining and responding to global social problems and global social policy (Bøås and McNeill, 2003: 2). Deacon (2005: 440) argues that the World Bank leads one ‘grouping of contestations’ which is ‘in competition for influence with the rest of the United Nations (UN) system’; we analysed the response from all of these organizations. We then worked down to an analysis of the role of regional organizations and analysed how the approaches and priorities of the global institutions that comprise the international system filtered down to the regional and national level. Some regional bodies, composed in particular of independent experts with profound knowledge of the societies they seek to serve, provided real-​time advice for governments that to neglect gender in their responses would have disastrous consequences. Yet, in the end, regional bodies are weak in implementation, even –​perhaps especially –​in times of emergency, and it is the national level that mattered in terms of developing and implementing on-​the-​ground policies to combat the virus and its fallout. It is at the national level, therefore, that the worst of the problems of gendered biases lie.

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Of course, the failures of national governments are not the only factor. We have shown in this book that, despite important advances in how gender is conceptualized in discourse and policy, there are multiple factors which hindered effective responses. The same problems with gender mainstreaming that feminist scholars have repeatedly emphasized were apparent in COVID-​19 policy response in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. Many COVID-​19 gender-​sensitive policies call to mind Debusscher’s (2012) criticisms of gender mainstreaming in European Union development policy towards Latin America, especially the definition of gender, the characterization of women, the approach to intersectionality, and the position of men in gender policies (McRobbie, 2008; Debusscher, 2012; Tolhurst et al, 2012). Debusscher (2012: 181) argues that the language found in these documents is ‘more the typical “Women in Development” language than one that reflects the inclusion of both women and men in the planning for the achievement of gender equality’. She concludes that: Women are consistently singled out and referred to as vulnerable, and they end up being considered solely responsible for the gender inequality problem. In general, men are the implicit norm and women are the problem holders who have to catch up with that norm. Beyond this, women are mentioned more in relation to problems than in relation to solutions, and the set of problems that is linked to women is much more varied than the set of solutions offered. (Debusscher, 2012: 193) Whether development agencies can effectively work towards gender equality is debatable.​Harcourt (2016: 1) argues that there is a ‘dilemma’ in terms of ‘feminist engagement working for social justice in a world dominated by patriarchal, racist, militarist neoliberal capitalism’. Rai (2018) has pointed out the tentativeness in development organizations to take a radical approach to gender in their policies. But the relationship

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between feminist researchers, civil society and development organizations has been productive to an extent over the years, so we can certainly hope that there is still a chance that policy-​makers will see COVID-​19 as an apt moment to put into practice in policy the vast amount of feminist research and campaigning that has taken place since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. For low-​and middle-​income countries, the World Bank and the IMF have been absolutely at the forefront of influencing states’ responses to COVID-​19 because, to put it bluntly, dealing with this crisis is expensive. Governments are largely relying on borrowing, thus increasing the debt they already have, and intensifying unstable pre-​crisis conditions. Wealthier countries, usually in the Global North, entered the crisis with less debt, and have more favourable borrowing conditions. On the other hand, poorer countries, mostly concentrated in the Global South, were forced to borrow more, with less favourable conditions. This disadvantages poorer countries in the short and long term. Both the IMF and the World Bank have hinted that austerity will be introduced as we ease out of the pandemic. Austerity negatively affects the most impoverished and vulnerable in society, and women are disproportionately overrepresented in poverty. Both the World Bank and the IMF acknowledged rhetorically the gendered nature of the crisis that the pandemic presented; nevertheless, their lending programmes have consistently failed to recognize the significance of gender. But then again, inequality, including gender-​based inequalities, is a necessary component for the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism, so it would therefore be surprising to see these institutions acknowledge the scale of reform required for an equitable exit from this crisis and put this into play in their policies. Pandemic lending to countries in the Global South has come with inevitable conditions: ‘spend whatever is needed but spend wisely and keep your receipts’ was the message from the head of the IMF during the first wave of the pandemic (IMF,

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2021c). This is now a hint, or perhaps more than a hint, that austerity will follow the initial expansion phase. But already, it is clear that the conditions that have been applied to this emergency funding –​that is, the production of receipts –​will disproportionately affect the poorest in society, including a majority of women. VAT increases, public sector wage cuts and the reduction or removal of energy subsidies are all recommendations to help create the capacity for governments to pay back loans. These policies will prolong the misery of poverty and suffering for the most vulnerable and increase the comfort of the richest. We can see clearly here the tension between gendered rhetoric from the IMF and World Bank on the one hand, and conditions of lending that perpetuate gendered inequalities on the other. Unfortunately, multilateral lending from the Bretton Woods Institutions was not the only area where gendered rhetoric and policy implementation diverged. Regionally, in both Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa, there was a clear disconnect between what regional organizations were tending to highlight as significant, gendered challenges, and the extent of their abilities to influence this gendered recognition into policy at a national level. For example, in Latin America, ECLAC was consistently vocal and produced plenty of research and recommendations to keep gender on the agenda. But this early understanding of what the pandemic would cost women has so far failed to feed into the core of policy, which is clearly highlighted in ECLAC’s policy trackers. In sub-​Saharan Africa, a region that was already struggling with scarce financial resources pre-​pandemic, the advocacy from the African Union and the EAC did point to the heightened challenges that women and girls would face during the pandemic. But when it came to policy implementation, women were not identified as a priority group and their interests became subsidiary. Limited resources meant that addressing gendered inequalities slipped down the list of priorities as governments chose other areas on which to concentrate spending. We have argued that this

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could be explained by a rise in nationalism, perhaps even by default, since the crisis has meant the need for quick decision-​ making. The outcome is that regional organizations, which have been strengthened for decades as a way to coordinate policy and amplify the voice of the Global South, have been reduced to the role of advice givers as opposed to key players in the COVID-​19 and post-​COVID-​19 crisis of economic and political development. As we have shown in this book, major development organizations at the global and regional level have different priorities. At the state level, governments in low-​and middle-​ income countries are dependent on and constrained by financial support from donors and global finance institutions. Feminist civil society and community organizations and researchers, who can make a valuable impact to women’s and girls’ lives on the ground, have no room at the table and their advice is rarely heeded. Where do we go from here? Two major transformations are needed, in our view, to ensure that the costs of future crises are not paid, yet again, by the most vulnerable girls and women. In the first place, the status of women and girls must change, and we must urgently apply the insights and analysis that identify the root cause of girls’ and women’s disadvantaged position in society. Second, governments across almost all low-​ and middle-​income countries must become not only seriously and genuinely gender-​sensitive in their policy-​making but, critically, more open, transparent, inclusive and democratic. Feminist political economy provides us with a much-​needed framework ‘to capture the complex nature of gender in a globalised capitalist era’ (Rai, 2018: 142–​143). By taking a feminist analysis to economic and political systems, we can see how some groups of women are consistently and profoundly disadvantaged as a result of the everyday discrimination that

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these systems create and recreate for individuals based on gender, race, social class, age and more (True, 2012; Elias and Roberts, 2018; Luxton, 2018; Rai, 2018). We can then take steps to reduce these vulnerabilities. We have shown how COVID-​1 9 policies favour the (narrowly defined) economy above all other considerations, and are biased towards men, especially those already occupying privileged positions based on their intersectional characteristics. Such policies ignore women’s experience of labour during COVID-​19. This is evidenced by the policies which saw female-​dominated sectors such as the hospitality and tourism industries shut down; those which did not do enough to protect workers in the female-​dominated health sector; the policies which have for decades converged to make informal labour the best option for many women yet the scarcity of policies that protect informal labourers during the pandemic; social welfare policies which pigeonhole women as mothers and not as citizen-​subjects; and those which fail to recognize women’s unpaid labour in the home. Colonialist, racist and misogynistic political interests continue to drive the workings of the World Bank, whose policies on lending shackle the poorest countries with further debt, in order to finance pandemic responses that harm the most vulnerable people within those countries. The same sorts of political interests mean that access to sexual and reproductive health services is curtailed for the women and girls most in need –​those living in poverty, especially Black, Indigenous, and girls and women of colour, or those living in rural areas. The political (and other) violence of migration policies isolates women and girls on the move and limits their access to essential services. In this context of increased poverty and desperation, the political economy of sex, which encompasses trafficking, prostitution, FGM and early marriage, prospers, at the expense of the poorest girls and women. We must, then, act upon changing the structural causes of girls’ and women’s disadvantage, overhauling systems that

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are heavily skewed by racism and male-​bias, which rely on exploiting whole groups of society in order to work for the few people in whose hands wealth and power is concentrated. Policies which take an intersectional and feminist approach can go some way towards achieving this. One way forward is to centre ‘social infrastructure and systems of care for people and the environment’ (AWID, 2020: 3) as the basis for strong economies. This would go a long way in easing the burden of care for girls and women and ensuring that the care work that is carried out by women and girls –​both paid and unpaid –​is valued and recognized. Girls and women living in poverty and those who are Indigenous, Black, or migrants in Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa carry out more unpaid care work than other women. Policies which value unpaid and underpaid care work would benefit these girls and women especially. Gender-​based violence is not something that only takes place ‘behind closed doors’ and should not be seen as a series of random, isolated incidents –​although in policy and elsewhere, it is often seen this way. Gender-​based violence impacts on all areas of public life and development. Yet, policy response overwhelmingly focuses on women victims –​who, obviously, must be supported –​but crucially, without any sense of punishing the individual men who perpetrate violence or the structures which continue to position women as inferior to men and which reinforce the position of women as isolated within the home. Going forward, policies on gender-​ based violence must tackle impunity for male perpetrators and empower women socially and economically. All women and girls are at risk of violence, but those who have less resources to leave violent situations or who live in communities where it is more normalized can struggle significantly more than other women, unless the root political and economic causes of violence against women are tackled and it is seen for what it is –​a problem for everyone, not just for individual survivors of violence or victims of femicide.

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It is essential that a huge, concerted effort is made globally so that girls can return to school after the pandemic, and that policies are put in place that support them to stay there. Being in school can keep girls safer from abuse and violence in the home and community and protect them from being married off as children or young teens, or being exploited through child labour. It also improves their future prospects and thus those of their communities. Policies that support families living in poverty, and those that provide incentives (monetary or otherwise) for girls to go to school –​incentives which are given directly to girls –​could be put in place. Feminist activists have consistently expressed their priorities on sexual and reproductive health. Indeed, the campaign for comprehensive sexual education, effective contraceptives and free, legal, safe abortion is at the forefront of contemporary feminist campaigning in Latin America. States must guarantee girls and women these rights. Those who make decisions on sexual and reproductive health are overwhelmingly wealthy, older men, and those who suffer the consequences are girls and women, particularly those living in poverty, and those who are Black, Indigenous, migrant and/​or disabled. Policy-​makers must leave their own religious and moral convictions to one side in order to put in place policies that provide women and girls dignity and autonomy over their bodies. Poverty exacerbates and makes vulnerable women and girls in all of these areas. An overhaul of global financial structures is perhaps too ambitious to ask. But, when the moratoriums on current debts end, countries in the Global South will struggle to meet both the existing and new debt repayments from a pandemic-​weakened fiscal position. Therefore, to have any hope of making progress towards the SDGs, breaking the cycle of debt and austerity needs to be a key focus. Here we advocate for more open and honest discussions about debt write-​offs and equal lending conditions that would certainly provide poorer countries with the opportunity to take part in the global economy on a more even playing field.

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Policies that protect and empower women workers and value their unpaid labour are essential in providing strong economies that work for all. Formalizing labour, ratifying ILO conventions that protect women such as 189 to protect domestic workers or 190 on violence and harassment would go a long way in improving women’s labour conditions. A universal basic income ‘extending beyond people in situations of poverty and reaching the broad social strata of the population that are very vulnerable to becoming poor’ to replace conditional cash transfers would guarantee the right to survival to a majority of the population (ECLAC, 2020c). The policy ideas we have suggested here are based on the research, campaigning and grounded knowledge of feminist activists, researchers and other influential figures. These feminist and women’s organizations and researchers must continue to be resourced, because this is the evidence which should underpin work towards the SDGs going forward. Progress may have been rolled back, and some opportunities missed. But governments can still act to make policy changes that empower the most vulnerable, if only the political economic context is properly analysed, and just policies are put in place to tackle and reverse years of profound marginalization and exclusion of the world’s most discriminated-​against girls and women. None of these changes can realistically be achieved without fundamental changes to how policy and politics proceed in many low-​and middle-​income countries. After decades of slow progress towards more democratic –​and women-​friendly –​ politics in the Global South, democratization has stalled, and masculinist authoritarianism is on the rise. As Lupien et al (2021: 297) show, policy-​making during COVID-​19 was led not by experts or science but rather by ‘presidents’ who played ‘a decisive role in the policymaking process’. This, in conjunction with a return of neoliberalism and distrust of the state as the challenges to market governance from the early part of the 21st century faded (Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2018), has proved quite literally fatal for women and girls in the

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Global South. The tasks of moving forward and preparing for future health crises mean not only having the ‘right’ plans for governments to act on in times of emergency; it also requires taking steps to address the gendered deficits in policy areas such as welfare, labour markets, education and health. This, in turn, means tackling the democratic deficits that reproduce and invisibilize poverty and discrimination. An eight-​point plan to build back better for girls and women We close with an eight-​point plan, based on the evidence presented in this book, which would lay the foundations for stronger and more equitable societies that work for all genders, both in times of ‘normality’ and in times of crisis. These are necessary suggestions that require open-​mindedness, commitment and honest acknowledgement of the failings of the misogynistic and racist systems and structures which currently control and dominate global social policy. 1. Policies and programmes for gender equality at national and international levels must be designed and led by feminist women and organizations who have an understanding of intersectionality and a commitment to reducing national and global inequalities. 2. The myth of the public/​private divide must be dispensed with, once and for all. Threats to women and girls’ wellbeing, health and prosperity cannot be seen as isolated incidents or individual problems; rather, these threats must be treated as both products of unequal societies and determinants of prosperous and fair societies. 3. Women and girls must not be singled out as the cause of their own problems, nor given sole responsibility for fixing them. Gender policies which acknowledge men’s role in women’s disadvantage are essential. This means prioritizing tackling impunity for men who murder and abuse women,

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better paternity leave and flexible working policies for all parents, and the promotion of equal responsibilities for managing families, including access to sexual and reproductive rights, free at the point of access, without shame or judgement. 4. It is essential to recognize that providing and receiving high quality, appropriate and safe healthcare continues to be gendered, and that changing this is essential in order to save girls’ and women’s lives. The extra risks posed to young women from some COVID-​19 vaccines, and the failure to research the impact of the vaccines on pregnant women (one of the groups most at risk from COVID-​19), shows how once again women are ignored and invisibilized in the development of medicine. Physical and epidemiological differences between gendered bodies must be acknowledged within medicine. 5. Independent gender experts, often located outside the nation state, whether in civil society or regional organizations, must be given a policy platform and listened to and should be allowed to play a key role in supporting and gendering the expansion of gender-​equitable national health systems. 6. Governance systems currently reflect misogynistic biases because women and girls are under-​represented within them; and poor, Indigenous women, Black women and women of colour are hardly present at all. This is also true of health, education and welfare systems. There is an urgent need to build from below more inclusive, respectful and democratic politics where diverse women play authoritative leadership roles in health, education and welfare systems, and feminist NGOs and activists have a genuine seat at the table. 7. Debt is not gender-​neutral and global financial packages should reflect this. Gender needs to be considered at all stages of international borrowing and it is essential that women and girls are prevalent in the creation and structure of financial packages. Global financial institutions should require that governments plan to mitigate for how

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borrowing places a greater burden on women and girls. And there is an immediate need that the institutions themselves do not impose conditionalities that exacerbate this burden. 8. A Global Gender Fund, under the leadership of diverse women, and with a lifespan of at least ten years, should be urgently created to mitigate the devastating impact of this global emergency on the lives and futures of girls and women, especially the most impoverished. It is only by committing financially to gender equality that global, regional and national institutions can demonstrate their commitment to walking the walk as well as talking the talk on gender equality.

161

Notes Introduction: Derailing Development, Exacerbating Gender Injustice 1 2

See https://​gcrf-​reghid.com/​ See https://​thanzi.org

two Unequal Development: What Lies Beneath COVID-19’s Gender Politics? 1 2 3

4

5

A figure which would be upgraded to in excess of 400 million by the end of 2020 (United Nations, 2020c). The Paris Club is a group of 22 creditor nations whose objective is to find workable solutions to payment challenges faced by indebted states. The problems of debt suspension are highlighted through already difficult future repayment schedules. Countries who are eligible for DSSI relief are already scheduled to repay US$115 billion of debt between 2022 and 2024, which will coincide with these suspended 2020 payments (Fresnillo, 2020). The initial 25 countries authorized for the CCRF were: Afghanistan, Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, D.R., The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-​Bissau, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Tajikistan, Togo and Yemen (IMF, 2020b). The number of microcephaly and/​or central nervous system malformation cases suggestive of congenital Zika infections: Brazil 1749, Colombia 21, United States 19 (WHO, 2016).

three Regional Governance: A Missed Opportunity to Tackle COVID-19’s Gendered Inequalities? 1

GIZ is the German agency for International Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit).

four Exacerbating Inequalities: Gender-Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Health 1

This policy means that NGOs operating outside of the US can only receive US global health assistance if they do not provide legal abortion

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2

services or referrals, and do not advocate for abortion law reform. First introduced by Ronald Reagan in 1984, it is up to individual presidents to decide whether they enact or revoke the policy, adding extra insecurity and uncertainty to NGOs. Some of the information and interview data in this section draws from interviews conducted under the Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls (REGHID https://​gcrf-​reg​hid.com/​) which we have cited here, with the kind permission of the PI, Professor Pia Riggirozzi.

five Exacerbating the Gender Gap: COVID-19 and Gendered Inequalities in Work and Education 1

In 2015 SDG 8 contained a specific recommendation (204) on the Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy, 2015 which included a specific statistical target on informal employment (8.3.1) (ILO, nd).

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201

Index References in bold type refer to tables. Australian Aid (DFAT)  91 AWID (Association of Women in Development)  17, 43–​44, 149, 156

A abortion  43, 108–​109, 110, 119–​120, 121 ActionAid (Ethiopia)  135–​136 Adhikari, S.  12 adolescent pregnancy  see child and adolescent pregnancy AfDB (African Development Bank)  63, 69, 86–​87 Africa CDC (Centre for Disease Control)  85–​86, 88 African Union  11, 54, 72, 79, 83–​84, 84–​85, 85–​86, 88, 91, 93, 99, 100, 107, 138, 153 gender equality policies  32–​33, 78, 117 Maputo Platform of Action 2016–​2030  106, 118 African Union Commission (AUC)  86, 89, 118 Al-​Ali, N.  42 Allon, F.  64 Andean Community  72 Anderson, B.  128 Argentina  Family Emergency Income programme  133 feminist activism  97–​98, 120–​121 financial policy responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic  133, 136 gender-​based violence  102, 104 national debt  57 paid domestic work  128 women’s shelters  104 Association of Women in Development (AWID)  17, 43–​44, 149, 156 AUC (African Union Commission)  86, 89, 118 austerity policies  64–​65, 152, 153

B Bárcena, Alicia  81, 82, 99 Benería, L.  4, 5 Benin  111 BHRRRC  55 Bidegain-​Ponte, Nicole  101–​102 Bøås, M.  150 Bolivia  105, 111–​112 Bolsonaro, Jair  77, 119 Brazil  8 child and early marriage  114 femicide  97 impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  9, 42, 54, 80 national debt  57 neoliberalism  9 paid domestic work  130 regional organizations  77, 79 research study  20 sexual and reproductive health  110, 119 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa) countries  8 Brizuela, V.  115 Burkina Faso  111, 113, 134

C Cape Verde  134 Caribbean  60 ‘categorical’ inequalities  6 CCRF (Catastrophe Containment Relief Fund), IMF  57 CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women)  32, 33

202

Index

CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States)  11 Central African Republic  113 Chad  113 child abuse/​child sexual abuse  48, 96, 103, 105, 112 FGM (female genital mutilation)  30, 112–​113, 117, 145 child and adolescent pregnancy  9, 109–​110, 111–​112, 138–​139, 141, 144 child and early marriage  9, 30, 112–​113, 117, 139, 141, 144, 145, 157 Chile  98, 105, 128 China  8, 91 gender-​based violence  99, 149 Chuku, C.  63 Clarke, R.  113 Colombia  110, 133 colonialism  6–​7 COMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa)  84 Commission on the Status of Women  32 commodity prices, impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  52 Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA)  84 Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR)  72 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)  11 contraceptives, access to  see sexual and reproductive health Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)  32, 33 Cornwall, A.  123 Corus, C.  27

Costa Rica  105, 120 Cote d’Ivoire  106, 111 Council of Europe  34 Covid-​19 Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)  81 COVID-​19 pandemic  and development  1–​2, 25, 30–​31, 35–​38, 40, 41–​45, 66–​ 70, 143–​144 and the education of women and girls  23, 68, 124, 137–​139, 141, 146, 147, 157 eight-​point plan for building back better for girls and women  159–​161 feminist recovery from  41–​44 financial policy responses to 49–​52, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 86–​87, 133, 134, 136–​137 and gender-​based violence  2, 15, 22, 30, 31, 36, 82, 95–​96, 98–​107, 144–​145 and national debt  49–​50, 54–​59, 69–​71, 86–​87, 152–​153, 155, 157 policy responses  147–​154 scale of  142 and unpaid domestic and care labour  3, 13–​14, 15, 30, 35, 36, 82, 131–​132, 136–​137, 146, 155 and women’s paid work  35–​36, 54, 67, 139–​141, 155 see also Latin America; sub-​ Saharan Africa

D Davies, S.  14 Deacon, B.  150 debt, national  160–​161 and gender inequality  59–​61, 62, 63–​66 impact of the COVID-​19 pandemic on  49–​50, 54–​59, 69–​71, 86–​87, 152–​153, 155, 157

203

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI)  56–​57 Debusscher, P.  151 Department for International Development (DFID), UK  91, 127 development  142–​143 crisis in  6–​12 dominance of economics in policy-​making  4–​5 and gender  4–​5, 24–​31, 44–​45, 150 GAD (Gender and Development) phase  33, 34 impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  25, 30–​31, 35–​38, 40, 41–​45, 66–​70 WAD (Women and Development) phase  33, 34 WID (Women in Development) phase  33–​34, 35, 151 impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  1–​2, 25, 30–​31, 35–​38, 40, 41–​45, 66–​70, 143–​144 DFAT (Australian Aid)  91 DFID (Department for International Development), UK  91, 127 Dhamoon, R.K.  27 digital platforms, use of in welfare support  135–​136 disability, and intersectionality 26 Dominican Republic  104, 114 DSSI (Debt Service Suspension Initiative)  56–​57

ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean)  11, 72, 81–​83, 92, 99, 132, 149, 153, 158 Division for Gender Affairs  77, 101–​102 ‘Montevideo Strategy for Implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda within the Sustainable Development Framework by 2030’  33, 106, 118 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)  see ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)  72, 86, 101 economics  and development policy-​making  4–​5 see also FPE (feminist political economy) ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States)  72, 86, 101 ECSA (East, Central and South Africa Health Community)  72 Ecuador  61, 105, 120, 121, 128 education of women and girls  23, 68, 124, 137–​139, 141, 146, 147, 157 El Salvador  110 Elias, J.  39 Elson, D.  32 employment  see work, and women Endler, M.  119 energy subsidies  64 ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council)  see GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) -​ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council)

E EAC (East African Community)  72, 78, 84, 86, 87, 99, 100–​101, 153 East, Central and South Africa Health Community (ECSA)  72 Ebola outbreaks, West Africa  60, 90, 109–​110, 126

204

Index

Esteves, P.  91 Eswatini  120 Ethiopia  102, 106, 113, 126, 131 ethnicity, and intersectionality  26 EU (European Union)  69, 91 expert knowledge, in regional organizations  74–​75 exports, impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  52

FPE (feminist political economy)  5, 24–​25, 38–​41, 64, 154–​155

G G20, financial policy responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic  52, 53, 54, 56 GAD (Gender and Development) phase of development policy  33, 34 Gates Foundation  66, 67, 69, 91, 135 GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) -​ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council)  ‘Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls’ project  20, 21 GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) -​MRC  ‘Thanzi la Onse’ project  20, 21 gender  and intersectionality  26–​28 see also development, gendered approach to Gender and Covid-​19 Working Group, Johns Hopkins University  149 Gender and Development Centre, ECOWAS  101 Gender and Development (GAD) phase of development policy  33, 34 gender mainstreaming  33, 34–​35, 151 gender-​based violence  29, 48, 97, 98, 121–​122, 156, 159–​160 FPE (feminist political economy) perspective on  39–​40 gender-​sensitive policy responses to COVID-​19 pandemic  36–​37

F Farrell, M.  74 female body, the  94–​95 female genital mutilation (FGM)  30, 112–​113, 117, 145 femicide  see gender-​based violence feminism/​feminist activism  154, 158 feminist recovery from COVID-​ 19 pandemic  41–​44 fourth wave  29 gender and development  4–​5 Latin America  29, 77, 94, 97–​ 98, 120–​121, 157 sexual and reproductive health  120–​121 sub-​Saharan Africa  30, 77–​78 see also FPE (feminist political economy) Feminist Alliance for Rights  43 Feminist Bailout Manifesto, AWID (Association of Women in Development)  43–​44 feminist political economy (FPE)  5, 24–​25, 38–​41, 64, 154–​155 FGM (female genital mutilation)  30, 112–​113, 117, 145 financial policy responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic  49–​52, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 86–​87, 133, 134, 136–​137 FIOCRUZ (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation)  78

205

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  2, 15, 22, 30, 31, 36, 82, 95–​96, 98–​107, 103–​107, 144–​145 informational campaigns  104 migrant women and girls  115 police and court responses  104, 106 pre-​COVID-​19  96–​98 regional organizations  78 shelter provision  104–​105 sub-​Saharan Africa  84 genders, marginalized  26–​28 Georgieva, Kristalina  65 Germany  51 GEWE (Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment), African Union  78 Ghana  126 Girls Not Brides  113, 114 Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)  see GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) -​ ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council); GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) -​MRC global development  see development Global Gender Fund  161 global political economy  21, 46–​49 impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  46–​47, 48, 55–​71 financial policies  49–​52, 53, 54 Gonçalves, Cleonice  130 grant aid  57, 69–​70, 86, 91 Grugel, J.  10, 66 Guatemala  111–​112 Guinea  113, 138

gender and development issues  12–​14 spending on  58, 59–​60 see also sexual and reproductive health HIV infections  116 Honduras  97 Horn, P.  10, 66 Huber, E.  6 Human Rights Watch  119–​120

I ICSE (International Child Sexual Exploitation) database  112 ILO (International Labour Organization)  15–​16, 125, 126, 127, 128 Convention 189 Domestic Workers Convention  129, 158 IMF  68, 127, 152–​153 CCRF (Catastrophe Containment Relief Fund)  57 financial response to the COVID-​19 pandemic  55–​56, 63–​64, 65–​66 Fiscal Monitor  63 India  54 intellectual property laws  17 Inter-​American Development Bank  57 Inter-​American Human Rights System  76 International Child Sexual Exploitation (ICSE) database  112 international governance systems  142–​143, 150 International Labour Organization (ILO)  see ILO (International Labour Organization) International Political Economy  5 see also global political economy Interpol  112 intersectionality  26–​28, 46–​47

H Harcourt, W.  37, 151 Harman, S.  14 healthcare  commodification of  17

206

Index

sexual and reproductive health  43, 96, 108–​109, 110, 111–​112, 114–​115, 116, 119, 119, 120–​122 unpaid domestic and care labour  132 work, and women  125–​126, 132–​133, 140–​141 Zika virus outbreak  60 Liberia  126, 138 Lopez Obrador, Andres Manuel  77, 104 Lupien, P.  148, 149, 158

J John, N.  14 Johns Hopkins University  142 Gender and Covid-​19 Working Group  149

K Kabeer, N.  4 Kenya  89, 105, 126, 138 Kharas, H.  2 King, A.  17

L

M

Latin America  5 abortion rights  43 advocacy and information services  81–​83 colonialism and inequality  6, 7 education of girls  35, 138, 139, 147 feminist activism  29, 77, 94, 97–​98, 120–​121, 157 ‘gender agenda’  29 gender inequality in land ownership  6 gender-​based violence  82, 94, 96, 97–​98, 99–​100, 101–​103, 104–​105, 106–​107, 121–​122, 145 impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  80, 89, 90, 91, 148 financial impact  54, 55–​56, 57–​58, 61, 62 national debt  57–​58 neoliberalism  8–​9 paid domestic work  128, 129 policy responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic  151 financial policies  61, 62, 133, 136 gender-​sensitive policies  36–​37 regional organizations  11, 12, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81–​83, 88, 89, 92–​93, 99–​100, 153–​154 research study  19–​21

Malawi  20, 106, 113, 134 Mali  113 Maputo Platform of Action 2016–​2030, African Union  106, 118 marriage, child and early marriage  9, 30, 112–​113, 117, 139, 141, 144, 145, 157 McNeill, N.  150 medicines, restricted access to  17 MERCOSUR (Common Market of the South)  72 Mexico  79 child and early marriage  114 feminist activism  33, 43, 97, 104–​105 financial response to COVID-​19 pandemic  61 gender-​based violence and femicide  77, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104–​105 impact of the COVID-​19 pandemic on  42–​43 regional organizations  77, 79 research study  20 sexual and reproductive health  116, 121 trafficking of women  48 unpaid domestic and care labour  131 women’s shelters  105

207

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

migrant women and girls  155 and intersectionality  26 paid domestic work  129 sexual and reproductive health  114–​116 Miller, A.M.  95 misogyny  29 Montgomery, M.  6–​7 Mukhopadhyay, M.  37 Muluneh, M.D.  97 Muraya, K.  105

Plan International  113 political economy  see FPE (feminist political economy); global political economy political representation of women  30 pregnancy, child and adolescent  9, 109–​110, 111–​112, 138–​139, 141, 144 Price, J.  94 public spending, impact of COVID19 pandemic on 49–​52, 53, 54 see also debt, national

N Namibia  129 national governments  policy responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic  150–​154 neoliberalism  8–​10 Niger  111, 113 Nigeria  102

R race, and intersectionality 26 Rai, S.M.  28, 35, 38, 39, 41, 151, 154 Rathgeber, E.M.  34 RCSDC (Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control)  86 RECs (Regional Economic Communities)  72, 79, 83–​84, 84–​85, 88–​89 Red Feminista Quintanarooense/​ Quintana Roo Feminist Network (RFQ)  121 ‘Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls’ project (GCRF-​ESRC)  20, 21 Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control (RCSDC)  86 Regional Child Protection Working Group  101 Regional Economic Communities (RECs)  72, 79, 83–​84, 84–​85, 88–​89 regional organizations  11–​12, 21–​22, 72–​75, 92–​93 and feminist, women’s and gender rights organizations  77 and gendering policy  76–​79

O OAS (Organization of American States)  11, 99 OECD  57–​58 Orchid Project  113 Organization of American States (OAS)  11, 99 Östlin, P.  13 Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ)  78 Oxfam  65

P PAHO (Pan American Health Organization)  72, 78, 81, 92, 99–​100 Palacio, H.  110 Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)  72, 78, 81, 92, 99–​100 Paraguay  105 patent protection  17 Peru  102, 133, 138 Peterman, A.  101, 106 Peterson, S.V.  24

208

Index

Latin America  11, 12, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81–​83, 88, 89, 92–​93, 99–​100, 153–​154 response to the COVID-​19 pandemic  12, 79–​80, 92–​93, 149, 150, 153–​154 advocacy and information  82–​85 logistical and financial support  85–​87 women’s rights  87–​92 sub-​Saharan Africa  11, 12, 72, 73, 74, 77–​78, 79–​80, 83–​87, 88–​89, 91, 92–​93, 100–​101, 153–​154 ‘revenge porn’  48 RFQ (Red Feminista Quintanarooense/​Quintana Roo Feminist Network) 121 Riggirozzi, P.  74, 79, 87 Rivas, A.-​M.  123 Russia  8 Rwanda  30, 134

impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  30, 36, 109–​114, 145, 146–​147, 155 migrant women and girls  114–​116 impact of Ebola crisis on  60 national-​level policies  117, 119–​120 needs and rights not respected  116–​120 pre-​COVID-​19  107–​109, 149 regional organizations  116, 117–​119 sexual orientation, and intersectionality  26 Shildrick, M.  94 Sierre Leone  60, 138 Singh, S.  110 social class, and intersectionality  26 Somalia  119–​120 South Africa  8 COVID-​19 pandemic support  134 education of girls  138 gender-​based violence  101, 106 paid domestic work  129 women’s shelters  105 Southern African Development Community (SADC)  72, 84, 86, 99, 100 Strategy for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment 2018–​2028, African Union  117 sub-​Saharan Africa  colonialism and inequality  6–​7 education of girls and women  138, 139, 147 feminist activism  30, 77–​78 financial impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  54, 58–​59, 69–​70 gender-​based violence  84, 96, 97, 99, 100–​101, 103, 105–​ 107, 115, 121–​122, 145 healthcare services spending  58

S SADC (Southern African Development Community)  72, 84, 86, 99, 100 school closures  3, 35, 83–​84, 112 see also education of women and girls, impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals)  10–​11, 66–​68, 123, 143, 144, 157 SDG 3  13, 107–​108 SDG 4  124, 137 SDG 5  48, 107–​108, 124 SDG 8  48, 125, 127 Sen, G.  13 sex industry, global  9, 48 sexual and reproductive health  13, 22, 48, 69, 121–​122, 160 feminist activism  120–​121

209

THE GENDERED FACE OF COVID-​19 IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

national debt  58–​59, 69–​70 paid domestic work  129 policy responses to the COVID-​19 pandemic  36–​37, 151 financial policies  52, 53, 54, 63, 86–​87, 134, 136–​137 regional organizations  11, 12, 72, 73, 74, 77–​78, 79–​80, 83–​87, 88–​89, 91, 92–​93, 100–​101, 153–​154 research study  19–​21 school closures  35, 83–​84 sexual and reproductive health  95, 96, 109–​110, 111, 112–​113, 114–​115, 117–​118, 119–​120, 121–​122 work, and women  125, 126, 140–​141 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)  see SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals)

UN Women  15–​16, 99, 125, 132, 149 UN World Conferences on Women  32 UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) 1–​2, 36–​37, 63, 82, 103, 106, 149 UNESCO  87 UNICEF  15, 137 United Nations General Assembly  97 universal basic income  158 unpaid domestic and care labour  5, 48, 130–​132, 144, 156 FPE (feminist political economy) perspective on  40–​41 gender-​sensitive policy responses to COVID-​19 pandemic  36–​37 impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  3, 13–​14, 15, 30, 35, 36, 82, 131–​132, 136–​137, 146, 155 government policy responses  132–​137 impact of neoliberalism on  9 US  51, 91, 99

T Tanzania  95, 134 Tarrow, S.  77 Tax, Stergomena Lawrence  100 teenage pregnancy  see child and adolescent pregnancy ‘Thanzi la Onse’ project (GCRF -​ MRC)  20, 21 ‘third world women’  27–​28 Tilly, C.  6 True, J.  29, 39, 97 Trump administration, US  106

V vaccines, restricted access to  17 Vaeza, María-​Noel  82 van Staden, C.  91

W WAD (Women and Development) phase of development policy  33, 34 WAHO (West African Health Organization)  72, 86 Washington Consensus  8 welfare support, use of digital platforms in  135–​136 Wenham, C.  90, 110 West African Health Organization (WAHO)  72, 86

U Uganda  20, 102, 120, 126 UK  51, 91, 99 UN (United Nations)  98 Covid-​19 Research Roadmap  15 Roadmap for Covid-​19 Recovery  126 UN bodies  11, 73 UN system  81, 150

210

Index

WHO (World Health Organization)  1, 11, 54, 73, 81, 98–​99, 110–​111, 119 WID (Women in Development) phase of development policy  33–​34, 35, 151 Williams, E.  142 women and girls  2–​3, 30–​31, 89–​90 bodily rights  94–​95 definition and categorization of ‘women’  25, 26 focus on in gender policies  25–​26 intersectionality  26–​28, 46–​47 ‘third world women’  27–​28 see also education of women and girls, impact of COVID-​ 19 pandemic on; gender-​ based violence; sexual and reproductive health; unpaid domestic and care labour; work, and women work, and women  22–​23, 46–​47, 123–​124, 125, 146 gender-​sensitive policy responses to COVID-​19 pandemic  36–​37

impact of COVID-​19 pandemic on  35–​36, 54, 67, 139–​141, 155 impact of neoliberalism on  9 informal sector  36, 47, 54, 64, 125–​127, 140–​141, 155 market traders  134–​135 paid domestic workers  127–​130 see also unpaid domestic and care labour World Bank  2, 4, 55–​56, 98, 127, 131–​132, 134, 135, 150, 152, 153, 155 World Health Organization (WHO)  see WHO (World Health Organization) World Vision  139 WTO (World Trade Organization)  52

Z Zika outbreak, Latin America  60, 90, 110 Zimbabwe  105, 106

211

“Drawing together theory and empirical research on gender, international development and feminist political economy, this book shines an often devastating — and sometimes hopeful — light on the impact of COVID-19 on women and girls in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.” Elizabeth Mills, University of Sussex

“An insightful and policy-relevant contribution. A must-read and must-act-upon if the goal is to redress inequalities and promote women’s rights in the recovery from the pandemic in the Global South and beyond.” Pia Riggirozzi, University of Southampton

In this important book, experts assess what the COVID-19 pandemic means for gender inequalities in the Global South, examining how threats to equitable development will impact the most marginalized and at-risk women and girls in particular. The book draws on research across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America to examine COVID-19-related issues around gender-based violence, work and care, education and health care, and asks whether global responses are enough to mitigate the negative outcomes of deepening gender inequality. It is a guide to stimulate the important debate about how to promote women’s rights during the management and recovery phases of the pandemic

Jean Grugel is Professor of Development Politics and Director of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, University of York. Matt Barlow is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York. Tallulah Lines is a PhD candidate in Politics and Research Associate at the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, University of York. Maria Eugenia Giraudo is Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at Durham University. Jessica Omukuti is Research Fellow on Inclusive Net Zero at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford.

ISBN 978-1-5292-1883-1

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