Participants described a development finance environment characterised by shrinking official development assistance, increasing reliance on private capital mobilisation, and growing emphasis on “future-fit” financial systems that can support domestic financing of development priorities. Many noted that this shift is occurring at the same time as growing geopolitical headwinds, civic space pressure, and coordinated anti-rights activity, which together create heightened risk for equality agendas.
A recurring view was that equality outcomes are vulnerable when treated as discretionary or secondary. Without explicit integration, new waves of finance can be gender blind or exclusionary. Participants highlighted that green investment growth can create missed opportunities, or even exacerbate inequalities, where social objectives are absent from standards and due diligence.
A light parallel was drawn with the way financing architectures have evolved in climate and are emerging in water, where more coordinated approaches have begun to align multiple actors around country led priorities, clearer standards, and repeatable delivery pathways. Participants noted that the lesson is not to import models wholesale, but to recognise how system level coordination and enabling conditions can shift financial flows over time.
Participants discussed evidence that public finance for gender equality is under pressure. A key message was that remaining official development assistance should be safeguarded for areas that private actors are unlikely to fund, including rights-based work, movement infrastructure, democracy-building, and accountability functions. Participants also emphasised that governments retain influence beyond grant funding, including through policy signals, procurement standards, regulation, diplomatic engagement, and participation in multilateral and standard setting processes.
At the same time, there was recognition that public actors shaping private capital flows have significant influence through guarantees, blended finance structures, standards, disclosure requirements and political dialogue, particularly through multilateral development banks and development finance institutions. Participants viewed these institutions as having a distinctive ability to combine financing with policy dialogue, and to influence the enabling environment in partner countries.
Participants framed the core challenge as the risk of gender blind and exclusionary finance as systems shift, and the core opportunity as shaping standards, incentives and finance tools so that equality outcomes are built into how capital moves.
Structures, systems and political economy
A strong theme was that financing outcomes are shaped by political economy rather than technical design alone. Participants highlighted that public finance systems are not neutral: they reflect existing power relations and norms, which can result in budgeting processes that systematically under resource marginalised groups.
Gender-responsive budgeting illustrated both progress and limits. Technical reforms and reporting have expanded across many contexts, yet participants repeatedly noted that reporting alone does not guarantee redistribution or outcomes. Without traceability of allocations, transparency of expenditure, and mechanisms to assess whether spending delivers results, gender-responsive budgeting risks becoming a box-ticking exercise.
Participants emphasised that budgets only change when people and institutions have the skills, access and power to influence them, and building that capacity is a form of infrastructure in its own right. Effective accountability often requires civil society and parliamentary actors to be able to interpret finance laws, understand budget structures, and negotiate across political contexts ranging from supportive to hostile. Participants also stressed that representation does not automatically result in redistributive outcomes. The ability to influence fiscal decisions depends on power dynamics within budgeting processes.
Another thread concerned fiscal policy and the treatment of fiscal space. Participants argued that debates about fiscal space can become overly constrained by debt and deficit framing and can obscure the role of public investment in expanding capability, supporting resilience, and generating medium term economic gains. Several participants stressed the importance of treating tax and spending together rather than as separate levers, and of classifying funding to social sectors, including GBV, as investments rather than expenditures.
Case study: strengthening gender responsive budgeting and fiscal governance (Morocco)
A case study highlighted how long running gender responsive budgeting reforms can remain weakly linked to actual fiscal decisions and outcomes. Feminist engagement with fiscal systems can shift gender budgeting from a technical reporting exercise to a political process of accountability, including by strengthening the capacity of civil society to analyse finance laws, generate evidence on service gaps, and engage parliamentarians and executive actors. The case also underscored persistent structural gaps, including limited visibility of budget allocations, weak expenditure tracking, and limited mechanisms to assess whether spending delivers gender outcomes.