McLeod Group Blog, June 6, 2018
Marie-Claude Bibeau, Canada’s Minister of International Development, recently invited entrepreneurs, NGOs and philanthropists to partner with Global Affairs Canada in an ambitious new initiative to propel women’s rights on a global scale. Bibeau has been pushing for new funding and new ways of delivering. She wants to move beyond traditional aid groups to gain support for her ambitious feminist international assistance policy.
To leverage the four-way partnership, Bibeau promised up to $300 million. Jess Tomlin of Match International, Jessica Houssian of Women Moving Millions, and Sophie Gupta of Yaletown Partners Investment firm will lead the initiative, along with the minister’s representatives.
Congratulations to Minister Bibeau and her department for the potentially bold breakthrough from “business as usual” for Canadian development cooperation.
The government will hold consultations this summer to seek advice on the initiative. There are important questions to be answered. And an imperative to build on experience.
The most important question is what the initiative is actually intended to do. At the announcement on May 25, Jess Tomlin cited the need to change systems for impact. She told the story of a woman philanthropist who invested in diabetes research after her husband died of the disease, only to find out that her investment holdings included products such as Coca-Cola that were at cross-purposes with her philanthropic intent, weakening the impact of her gift.
Will the initiative provide core funding for women’s rights organizations – an investment yielding social, but not financial return? Or will it invest in businesses that employ and benefit women – yielding financial returns that will be shared with women’s rights groups in perpetuity? Or what mix of the two? Women’s rights organizations need predictable, long-term core funding to do their work, rather than project funding. And it needs to be substantial, not marginal.
A number of useful examples and experiences could provide guidance. For example, BRAC in Bangladesh, the largest NGO in the world, uses a model that employs women in sophisticated value chains and uses the profits from its enterprises to fund health, education and social advancement for women – with a total budget of over half a billion dollars annually for its social enterprises. Other organizations, such as the UGC cooperatives in Maputo, Mozambique, and Lijjat Papad in India have also used the shared profit/social enterprise model. Women’s World Banking – an international organization given start-up funds by CIDA in the 1980s – guarantees loans and promotes financial technology worldwide so women can access mainstream banks.
Under any scenario, strengthening the global women’s rights movement needs to be enshrined as the primary objective. This is especially the case, given the power imbalance between the partners and the disappointing experience with international social impact investing to date.
If a foundation-type model is selected, the initiative would have to come to grips with the restrictions of the Canada Revenue Agency’s “direction and control” guidelines (see our blog on this problem).
Finally, this is not the 1960s or 1970s when it made sense to channel contributions through Canadian organizations such as IDRC or CUSO. A sophisticated ecology of women’s funds and women’s rights organizations now exists at the local, national, regional and global level. Any new Canadian initiative must fill a unique niche and strengthen the global ecology, rather than seeking to brand itself and Canada at the expense of southern organizations or efforts to build collaboration. It is crucial to involve women leaders from the South in designing and delivering this initiative.
We urge our readers to join the consultations and to put on their best creative thinking caps to help Minister Bibeau build a solid foundation for the new partnership.