By Bruna Martinez, program manager of Walking the Talk at Hivos, and Jim Monkel, advocacy officer of Walking the Talk at Hivos.
From the 1995 Beijing Declaration to Addis Ababa and the Sustainable Development Goals, world leaders have promised that gender equality would be central to global development. So, by now you’d think gender equality and non-discrimination are near-universal values and priorities. But the fact is that many governments just pay them lip service in speeches and declarations instead of meaningful resources. Underfunded and ignored, policies promoting these values are still waiting for governments and funders to start walking their talk.
But grassroots feminist movements are helping to even the equation. Their innovations, organizing, and leadership skills are sustaining women, girls, LGBTIQ+ people, and other vulnerable communities through conflict, climate impacts, and democratic backsliding.
Many governments pay mere lip service to gender equality in speeches and declarations instead of allocating meaningful resources
We met up with some of them at the Financing for Feminist Futures (F4FF) conference in Madrid in October. Here, feminist activists, civil society partners, donors, multilateral institutions, and policymakers confronted a shared truth. Without sustained, strategic financing, feminist movements cannot reach their full potential. But with bold and accountable investment, transformative change is within reach; investing in equality, care, and justice is possible.
As South Africa prepares to host the G20, governments and financial institutions will be under scrutiny. Will they treat feminist financing as a footnote, or will they place it at the heart of global economic reform? As South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Honorable Mmapaseka Steve Letsike, reminded us, “Every national budget is a moral document that must reflect the lives we value and the labor we recognize.”
What feminist financing really means
Feminist financing is not a niche cause. It’s the idea that how we raise, allocate, and manage money should actively dismantle systems of exclusion and oppression, not reinforce them. Hon. Letsike’s intervention during the session on “Financing for development: mobilizing national resources” cut to the heart of the issue. She called for three shifts that the world must make: to mainstream feminist financing in global financial architecture, to recognize and remunerate care work, and to innovate inclusively, asking, “Who are we including when we talk about innovation?”
Youth, resistance, and reimagining power
Throughout F4FF, we heard from the powerful voices of those too often treated as “beneficiaries” rather than experts: young feminists from global majority countries. Yasmina Benslimane, founder of Politics4Her, challenged the audience to confront how well-intentioned funding reproduces hierarchies. “When donors talk about ‘empowering,’ who defines the margins and the flows of funding?” she asked.
She spoke of the feminist youth organizers — migrant domestic workers, Palestinian and Sudanese youth collectives — who are saving lives, coordinating evacuations, rebuilding after climate disasters, and holding communities together. Yet, as she pointed out, “They are the most underfunded and silenced.” For Benslimane, feminist financing cannot be separated from the violence of militarization, border regimes, and patriarchal states. It must be about redistributing power, not just money.
“Business as usual is not doing the job”
For Hivos CEO Marco De Ponte, the Madrid conference was a powerful reflection on the current funding structures, within philanthropy especially. “Conventional advocacy is not sufficient,” he told the participants at the opening reception. “We must find creative, collective ways to gain ground. Business as usual is not doing the job.”
He underscored that investing in gender equality is essential to democracy itself. Feminism, he reminded us, is not an identity or an ideology; it is a practical strategy for ensuring that power and resources serve the majority. “We are not here to create a bubble,” he said. “We are here to create an enabling environment for everyone and to hold decision-makers accountable.”
From sessions on financing gender-just climate action, to countering anti-gender movements and queering the rules of funding itself, the conference showed feminist financing to be both pragmatic and radical. pragmatic in its data and fiscal demands, radical in its insistence that economies must care for life, not exploit it.
Walking the talk
It’s time for our governments and international institutions to start walking the talk
Financing gender equality and feminist movements is the most effective way to invest in healthier societies and stronger democracies. The research compendium published by the Walking the Talk consortium, The Architecture of Change: Feminist Pathways to Financing Gender Equality, lays out the evidence clearly. Debt and austerity policies disproportionately harm women and LGBTQI+ people by gutting public services and care systems. And yet our research shows that feminist alternatives exist – new fiscal models that center the care economy, redistributing wealth via tax systems, and building resilience against climate disasters.
The 2025 Seville Commitment (Compromiso de Sevilla) lays the ground for agreements by governments on financing for development but doesn’t live up to the need for investment in gender equality, among other shortcomings. It, and other similar documents, pledge to mainstream a “gender perspective” across the development agenda, but now we need to hold our governments and international institutions accountable to these commitments. It’s time they started walking the talk.
A call to governments and donors
The global feminist movement has already shown what inclusive, care-centered economies could look like on paper. What we need now is political will to make progressive and sustainable economic systems a reality. Governments must treat feminist financing not as a “gender issue,” but as a democratic imperative. Donors and private funders must move beyond pilot projects and (continue to) fund the movements that have been at the forefront of inclusive innovation for systemic change.
We are not only demanding a seat at the table; we are redesigning the table itself. Feminist financing is about justice, sustainability, and democracy in action that serves to benefit all. The question now is whether our budgets, our financing structures, our funders, and our governments will choose to value equality, care, and justice within strong democracies, or continue to underwrite inequality and backsliding on all fronts.
This op-ed was originally published on the Alliance Magazine website.