Towards Decolonial Gender-Transformative Development Assistance: Reflections on the Role of Canadian Development Organisations and Local Partners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Launched in 2017, Canada's Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) aims to champion gender equality in development cooperation and programming. Proposals submitted to Global Affairs Canada for funding are rigorously assessed according to gender equality criteria, and applicants are required to conduct gender-based analyses and consult local women's groups. Global Affairs Canada has also prioritized 95% of their funding for projects that adequately integrate and target gender equality. While the FIAP policy has good intentions, it inadequately conceptualises gender equality and intersectionality, and contains Western-centric, neo-liberal, and instrumental notions of feminism and development. An understanding of how development organisations and their local partner organisations in the global South navigate, operationalise, and transform the FIAP is also lacking.This article argues that Canadian development organisations and their local partners in the global South have a crucial role to play in improving the FIAP's efficacy by sharing their experiences, successes, and challenges with Global Affairs Canada. Global Affairs Canada, for its part, must be open and receptive to these critiques, feeding organisations’ suggestions into future iterations of the FIAP. A robust feedback loop is needed to truly decolonise Canadian foreign assistance. This necessitates Canadian organisations and their local partners to proactively advocate for creating channels that enable them to share their experiences and insights with Global Affairs Canada. This feedback should aim at not only providing criticism of the FIAP, but also amplifying promising approaches. For instance, some organisations have developed complex and localised understandings of gender and intersectionality, using decolonised and participatory approaches, and have built strong partnerships with local partners and local gender activists. These organisations can and should be allowed to positively influence future policies and practices with donors, policymakers, and practitioners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".