Search All

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women’s rights and gender equality specialists in international non-governmental development organisations, as analysed from an insider practitioner perspective. Part 1 identifies the strategies used and the challenges encountered when Turquet lobbied DFID on its gender equality policy while struggling to avoid marginalisation within her own organisation, Action Aid. In Part 2, Smyth describes how she left Oxfam for a year to work in the Asian Development Bank and uses this experience to consider the strategic opportunities available to a gender specialist working in an NGO such as Oxfam as compared with working in an international finance institution. …

Ines Smyth works for Oxfam and spent a year as the leading gender specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) - an institution with a very different ethos and priorities. She explores how the characters of the two organisations shape their commitments and approaches to promoting gender equality in their programmes. …