2008
The 2008 global financial crisis intensifies structural inequalities worldwide, with women—particularly in the global South—bearing the heaviest burdens. In its wake, international financial institutions impose austerity-style “recovery” measures that lead to drastic cuts in public services, job losses, and declining access to health, education, and social protections.
Feminist movements across Latin America, Africa, and Asia forcefully reject these neoliberal prescriptions, exposing how so-called economic recovery is achieved through the dispossession of women’s livelihoods, the neglect of reproductive health, and the exploitation of unpaid care work. The Women’s Working Group on Financing for Development (WWG on FfD), cordinated by DAWN, launches a call for structural, sustainable, gender equitable and rights based responses to the global financial and economic crisis.
Feminists movements advance alternative visions: redistributive economic policies grounded in social protection, labour rights, access to land, and credit. By linking economic justice to gender justice, feminists reframe the crisis as a political battleground—one that reveals the profoundly gendered nature of global economic governance and the systemic violence of austerity.