The Grand Bargain: We are not yet involving women from local communities in decision-making

June 16, 2021

The Grand Bargain launched during the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. It is a unique agreement between humanitarian agencies and donors. It aims to reform and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of international humanitarian aid.

2021 marks the fifth year of the Grand Bargain. And so, Signatories are meeting this week to agree and endorse a new iteration of the agreement – the Grand Bargain 2.0.

The Grand Bargain remains the most important initiative to strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian aid. As a result, important progress has been made towards achieving the Grand Bargain’s ambitions, including:

Improving joint and impartial needs assessment.
Harmonised reporting requirements, and recognition for greater transparency.
Strengthening steps towards supporting and funding local and national responders.

Local Women Left Out

Unfortunately, the Grand Bargain still fails to meaningfully shift power, resource, and decision-making power to women’s rights and women-led organisations.

For instance, in 2019, only 2% of signatories reported against the core commitment indicator on building the capacity of local women’s rights and women led organisations.

Similarly, tracking of the volume of funds directed to these organisations remains very limited. Only 4% of signatories reported against this indicator. Efforts to introduce more detailed tracking of funding for local women’s organisations have failed.

And, only 3% of women’s rights and women led organisation survey participants directly engaged in any Grand Bargain meetings or events over the first five years.

When women and their organisations’ contributions are undervalued, the impact on their rights can be detrimental and long-lasting. In addition, undervaluing local women’s roles in responding to a humanitarian emergency impacts the effect of the response for them and their communities.

Bringing a Feminist Lens to the Grand Bargain 2.0

As the review takes place, ActionAid authored a policy brief entitled: “Bargaining for Better: Bringing a Feminist Lens to the Grand Bargain 2.0.”

The report includes feedback from women’s rights groups and women-led organisations. And by ActionAid humanitarian staff, working on the frontline in 10 countries. The ten countries are: Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Jordan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Lebanon, Liberia, and Palestine.

The findings of the report are:

The agreement remains gender-blind. To-date, there are limited commitments on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls.
To date, it has failed to meaningfully engage with women’s rights and women-led organisations.

Our recommendations

Include Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls as an essential political goal within the Grand Bargain.
Increase the representation of local women’s rights organisations and women-led organisations within the formal structures of the Grand Bargain Facilitation Group.
Grant the Friends of Gender Group a formal seat in the Facilitation Group to increase the voices of local women’s rights organisations and women-led organisations.
Donors, UN agencies, and international NGOs must support women’s rights and women-led organisations who they partner with to become full signatories of the Grand Bargain.

Humanitarian policy, including the Grand Bargain, cannot continue to make decisions about how to serve crisis-affected women and girls without the direct input of the women’s rights and women led organisations.

However, the Grand Bargain 2.0 is an opportunity to correct this. And so, it is crucial that we work to address the blockages that obstruct progress on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

We must invest more resource and funding in women and their organisations. And local women-led and women’s rights organisations need to be part of those decision-making processes.

Read the full report here.

Pictured above: Portrait of Sharmin Akter Rina, 21 is a case management worker for ActionAid. She supports women and girls living in the Rohingya refugee camps at Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo credit: Fabeha Monir/ActionAid

Protestors at COP 28 in Dubai. Photo: Konrad Skotnicki.

Belfast Climate Change March, 2019. Photo: Trócaire.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

Despite their overwhelming contribution to global emissions, fossil fuel companies continue to attract significant financial backing—driven by their enduring profitability. This is starkly illustrated by the case of ExxonMobil, the top fossil fuel investment held by asset managers based in Ireland. In 2023, ExxonMobil reported €33.63 billion ($36 billion) in profit. That is almost twice the GDP of Botswana (€18.1 billion) and nearly three times Namibia’s GDP (€11.5 billion).

Ireland plays a hugely disproportionate role in facilitating investments into fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. In 2023, the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland generated an estimated 72.5 million tons of CO2e. This is more than the CO2e emissions for the entire country of Ireland—and more than ten times that generated by Sierra Leone.

The Global Human Impact

The climate crisis is here, now, and it is causing disproportionate harm in the Global South. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels and increasingly severe cyclones are displacing coastal communities, with projections indicating that 17% of the entire country could be underwater by 2050. The legally binding Paris Agreement on climate change explicitly acknowledges the importance of tackling private finance. Its three overarching goals are: keeping below 1.5C of warming; increasing adaptation and making finance flows consistent with low emissions and resilience.

This gives a clear mandate for action: both tax reform and corporate regulation are needed to tackle financial flows, and both nationally in Ireland and at EU level, ‘polluter pays’ taxes are lacking and regulation of the financial sector remains weak and fragmented. While EU regulation exists, it is designed more to nudge investors toward more sustainable investment practices by increasing transparency and reporting levels than to enforce strict standards. And it is moving in the wrong direction: the recently passed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive excluded investments; and now the EU Commission’s Omnibus legislative proposal threatens to undo the limited gains made on climate plans, as well as blocking future attempts for stronger action at national level.

The Risk of Inaction

Fossil fuel investment is too profitable to remain weakly regulated. If Ireland continues with its current strategy of encouraging FDI at all costs, and relying on weak EU regulation, we are headed for catastrophe. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5°C brings irreversible consequences: collapsed ice sheets, vanishing coral reefs, and extreme weather events that will make vast regions of the planet uninhabitable. And yet, companies are developing oil and gas fields that could push global warming beyond 2°C.

Our research found that 91% of the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland were to companies that have plans for fossil fuel expansion like these. Ireland cannot afford inaction on this issue.

About This Research

The figures in this report regarding investment from Ireland are based on new research commissioned by ActionAid Ireland and Trócaire. In the paper, we uncover the scale of fossil fuel investment through Ireland, who the investors are, and in which fossil fuel companies they are investing. We analyse the current regulatory framework and explain why it is inadequate—and moving in the wrong direction. And we make specific recommendations for change, which are summarised below.

Summary of Recommendations

Regulate the private financial sector
Ireland must end its outsized role as an enabler of destructive fossil fuel investment. Ireland should introduce a strong gender-responsive national human rights and environmental due diligence framework which includes the regulation of investors with respect to human rights and the environment and climate. The transposition of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could achieve this if downstream activities are included and the Omnibus proposal is rejected. Ireland should prohibit investments in fossil fuel expansion and require investors to implement climate transition plans consistent with a 1.5°C climate limit.

Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Ireland should endorse developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to curb fossil fuel expansion and commit to a fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels.

Support tax justice
Ireland should support bold and fair new global tax rules through the UN Framework Convention on Tax, should adopt all OECD BEPS measures, and should conduct an updated and comprehensive spillover analysis of its tax policy. Ireland should take coordinated action globally, at the EU level and domestically to introduce a range of new taxes to mobilise finance needed for climate justice, based on ‘polluter pays’ and social equity principles such as wealth taxes for the highest earners, climate damages tax on investors, fossil fuel production taxes and levies on aviation and shipping.

Finance a just transition
Ireland must also meet its fair share climate finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and pay our ecological debt to the Global South. Ireland should support conditionality-free debt cancellation for countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, commit to a new UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, moving debt negotiations from the IMF to the UN, and to a debt workout mechanism that is fully representative and fair.