Gender and Debt are intrinsically linked : PFDD’s position paper and recommendations to the PFDD position paper to take in account gendered aspects in our fight against debt

In addition to the analysis and general recommendations of the French Platform on Debt and Development (PFDD), which can be found here, our collective wanted to bring the issue of gender inequality further into its work. The aim being to better understand how debt, gender and human rights issues are intrinsically linked, and what specific recommendation can be formulated to address these issues. Debt needs to be considered in the context of social relations, and in particular with regard to gender, since women and girls are amongst the most impacted by the unsustainable debt burden in developing countries.

Unsustainable debt in the South and gender transversality are interconnected, with significant implications for sustainable development, social equity and economic justice. For all these reasons, gender inequalities need to be tackled while preventing and combating debt unsustainability in the South, in particular by :

• Cancelling debts from all creditors, including private and multilateral creditors, in order to reduce debts to a level that satisfies the fundamental rights and basic needs of populations, for all countries that request it, including middle-income countries.
• Integrating a gendered perspective into debt cancellation negotiations to take into account and mitigate the negative impacts of restructuring agreements on women.
• Supporting, by all means, the public sector and public health systems in developing countries, with a double benefit for women : as citizens with access to better healthcare conditions, and as employees with greater employment opportunities.
• Creating a permanent and independent multilateral mechanism for the resolution of sovereign debt, under the authority of the United Nations, which offers a fair, transparent, comprehensive and rapid resolution of debt, and which integrates a gender perspective and contributes to the achievement of the recommendations resulting from the agreed conclusions of the 68th edition of the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
• Going beyond the IMF’s traditional Debt Sustainability Analyses, which today focus on a country’s repayment capacity, to consider whether the level of debt and its servicing, with advices from the UN and civil society, would compromise the minimum fiscal resources available to the state to ensure the respect of human rights and the right to development, as well as equitable gender-sensitive economic justice including the prohibition of gender-based discrimination.
• Eliminating conditionalities in debt relief initiatives and debt restructuring mechanisms that risk exacerbating gender inequalities.
• Demanding that international financial institutions carry out gender impact assessments of their loans and reforms.

For further reading, we recommend the book "Feminism in public debt - A human rights approach" (2024) co-edited by Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and Mariana Rulli and published by Bristol University Press, available free of charge in Englishand in Spanish.