Gender is everywhere in Southeast Asian aid, but not where it counts

Gender is now embedded across much of Southeast Asia’s development finance. Nearly half of all official development finance (ODF) to the region — around $13 billion in 2023 — carries a gender equality marker, more than four times the share in 2015. Gender has, in the language of development, been successfully “mainstreamed”.

The problem is that mainstreaming has begun to obscure as much as it reveals, which becomes visible when you look past the headline figure.

The Lowy Institute Southeast Asia Aid Map (Opens in new window) tracks gender objectives using metrics developed for the OECD DAC gender equality policy marker (Opens in new window), which distinguishes between “principal” objectives, where gender equality is fundamental to the project, and “significant” ones, where it features but is not the primary purpose. Between 2015 and 2023, the share of ODF marked “significant” for gender rose from 8% to 42%. The “principal” share, where gender is actually the point, has stayed relatively flat at around 2 to 3% across the same period. Growth in gender-integrated ODF has come almost entirely through the significant marker. As Grace Stanhope notes in a recent Lowy Institute policy brief (Opens in new window), gender is increasingly part of development projects, but much less often the reason those projects exist in the first place.

Across Southeast Asia, women’s economic participation runs up against deep structural barriers.

The most immediate constraint is care. According to the ILO (Opens in new window), women in Asia and the Pacific perform 80% of all unpaid care work, 4.1 times more than men, and this asymmetry shapes their working lives more than almost anything else. The gender gap in labour force participation (Opens in new window) sits at close to 25 percentage points across the region, above the global average. In Indonesia, female participation hovers around 53% (Opens in new window), a figure that has barely changed over three decades despite near-parity in schooling. Evidence increasingly shows that even limited childcare support can increase women’s labour force participation. (Opens in new window) Yet childcare and care infrastructure remain marginal in the region’s development finance portfolio.

Participation is only the first step; women’s economic opportunities ultimately depend on the availability of good jobs. Across Southeast Asia, many women remain concentrated in informal and lower-paid work (Opens in new window), suggesting that the binding constraints are no longer simply about access to capital. Yet development finance has often focused on expanding access to credit, particularly through microfinance. While valuable in some contexts, the evidence suggests (Opens in new window)that access to credit works best alongside reforms that expand women’s access to productive employment

The deeper constraint is institutional. The broader policy and economic environment shapes whether women can translate labour force participation into secure and productive employment. Yet these institutions are also deeply intertwined with social norms, which, according to the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index (Opens in new window), worsened across Southeast Asia between 2014 and 2022. Reform is slow, politically difficult, and rarely fits neatly into donor funding cycles. As a result, aid often supports women without changing the institutions that shape their economic opportunities.

The structural fragility runs further still. More than two-thirds of the region’s gender-integrated ODF flows through the multilateral development banks (MDBs), and that concentration is now a vulnerability. The United States is the largest shareholder at the World Bank and second-largest at the ADB (Opens in new window), and Washington’s pushback on gender and social inclusion programming means the threat is not confined to the bilateral channel. If MDB gender priorities are quietly diluted under shareholder pressure, there is no obvious backstop.

At the same time, bilateral aid is projected to fall 20% by 2026 (Opens in new window), from around $11 billion to $9 billion. The US, UK, and EU together account for roughly two-thirds of development funding for civil society (Opens in new window) in the region, much of which supports the longer-term reform efforts needed to address the structural drivers of gender inequality. As these donors scale back, the greatest risk is not simply less gender-focused aid, but less investment in addressing the structural barriers that shape women’s economic opportunities. The consequences are likely to be felt most acutely in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Timor-Leste, where development assistance continues to play a particularly important role.

Presence in a portfolio is not the same as priority. Gender cannot be bolted onto a project and expected to deliver meaningful change. Tracking gender across billions of dollars in aid is useful, but it can also create the illusion of progress. The harder question is whether aid is addressing the constraints that shape women’s economic lives in the first place. Too often, the answer is “no”. The real ambition should be what sits underneath — in care infrastructure, in institutional reform, in the slow work of ensuring economic growth does not simply pass women by.