Gender equality and foreign aid

In recent years there has been growing diversity in development cooperation reflected in the increasing multiplicity of donor organisations and approaches to aid provision. At the same time, international development cooperation has witnessed significant attempts to organise and coordinate the ways in which ‘development’ is conceived and practiced since the late 1990s.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2000 and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness adopted by well over 100 governments, multilateral institutions, and international organisations in 2005, have sought to establish a common framework for ‘good development cooperation’ including standardised rules and common goals and principles.

One such norm regards gender equality and the empowerment of women as expressed in the third MDG. This goal has a particular focus on eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2015 globally.

Through a comparative study of seven different donor organisations, the research programme, Global Norms and Heterogeneous Donor Organisations (GLONO), explores how increasingly different donor organisations and global norms framing good development cooperation influence concrete gender activities.

This research is important

• because international efforts to agree on a framework for development cooperation may be of limited value depending on how donor organisations actually take these agreements into account,
• because the shifting global power dynamics sets new conditions for foreign aid,
• because gender equality is increasingly a contested issue at the international level, and
• because donor organisations may differ along other lines than we normally think

GLONO studies the following donor organisations: South African Development Partnership Agency (SADPA), Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation (AMEXCID), Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark (DANIDA), World Bank, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Oxfam International, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

GLONO is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research | Social Sciences and by Danish Institute for International Studies. It runs from 2014 to 2016 and involves Danish and British researchers.

Read more about GLONO


The research programme was launched at a seminar 25th March on gender equality in foreign aid.