Cooperation Canada recognizes the importance of strategic collaboration in efforts to dismantle systemic racism in Canada and abroad. The organization is undergoing its own internal process of anti-racist institutional change and collaborating with the rest of the sector to ensure collective and inclusive approaches.

Cooperation Canada has convened an advisory group to articulate avenues of collective action towards a more anti-racist sector. Systemic racism exists everywhere, including in the international cooperation sector, which aims to contribute to building a better and fairer world. To do that, our organizations must address the sector’s legacy of racial bias (particularly anti-Black and anti-Indigenous bias). We must also work to redress global interventions that have denied peoples and institutions from historically disadvantaged countries their agency and right to self-determination in the name of economic and social progress. As a signatory to human rights treaties (including those addressing reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and protecting all persons from bias based on race, ethnicity, or other identity factors), we are committed to upholding values of equality, dignity and inclusion and advocating for their application across all areas of Canada’s global engagement.

To support a collective sector approach, Cooperation Canada has convened a diverse advisory group that developed a comprehensive framework for anti-racist efforts. The Framework outlines key commitments ranging from efforts to shift institutional structures and processes, to addressing racial bias in the work of sector organizations, particularly relating to partnerships, program design and implementation, advocacy, storytelling, and communications more broadly. After an inclusive consultation process, the Framework was launched on 20 January for organizational sign on.

To ensure accountability and a forward-looking approach, the Framework will be facilitated by a Hub, consisting of a Task Force for Accountability and a Working Group for strengthening sector capacity. The Task Force will produce annual reports and inform the priorities of the Working Group, whose activities will aim at strengthening the institutional and collective capacity of signatory organizations to make progress against the commitments outlined in the Framework.

This Framework is not perfect or final, nor is it our destination. This Framework, however, will provide a common ground, guiding instruments, and a momentum for a more anti-racist international cooperation sector. We invite you to sign on to the Framework (available below in English and French), reach out to others to do the same, and engage with us moving forward. This is just the beginning, and we can’t wait to begin this work with you.

From Adam Smith International. Private sector development (PSD) practitioners are increasingly pursuing strategies aimed at increasing income and economically empowering poor women. For programmes to credibly prove that these strategies impact poor women – and to improve this impact through adaptive design and delivery – monitoring and results management (MRM) systems must be capable of understanding differentiated gendered impact. Where MRM systems are truly gender-responsive, they serve a function beyond accurate sex-disaggregated results reporting, and are crucial in influencing programme design, for example, the effective identification and profiling of female target beneficiaries during scoping for sector selection (who tend conventionally to be ‘missed’ or misunderstood, particularly within male-headed households).

Nonetheless, a number of measurement challenges remain. Most pressing among these, is the lack of clarity on who to count as a beneficiary when measuring changes to income. Crucially, the different ways in which this is approached tell very different stories as to the gendered impact of a PSD programme.

Edited by Elsa De Morais Sarmento and R. Paul Herman. This is a guide to the growing world-wide movement of Impact Investing. Impact investors seek to realize lasting, beneficial improvements in society by allocating capital to sources of impactful and sustainable profit. This handbook is a how-to guide for institutional investors, including family offices, foundations, endowments, governments, and international organizations, as well as academics, students, and everyday investors globally. The handbook´s wide-ranging contributions from around the world make a powerful case for positive impact and profit to fund substantive, lasting solutions that solve critical problems across the world.

From 2X Challenge. Gender lens investing (“GLI”) has gained significant traction globally and a compelling business case combined with a strong impact case makes GLI attractive to impact-driven and purely commercial investors alike. Despite this and the emergence of key tools, training and resources during 2020, the funding gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal #5 (Gender Equality) remains a significant challenge. To truly mainstream GLI, investors have called for concrete guidance on how to structure a gender lens into the legal documentation of a transaction. Responding to this growing demand, Hogan Lovells and 2X Challenge have launched Aurora: The Gender Lens Project.

By Caroline Criado-Perez. This book exposes the gender data gap - a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women's lives. Criado-Perez brings together an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women.

By Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. In this book, D'Ignazio and Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, the authors show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

From Harvard Business Review. Iceland’s equal pay for equal work system is still in the early stages, but initial signs suggest that requiring organizations prove they compensate employees fairly may be very effective. Much more effective, in any case, than the alternatives currently in place elsewhere. Introduced in 2018, the policy requires companies and institutions with more than 25 employees to prove that they pay men and women equally for a job of equal value. If companies show they pay equally for the same positions, they receive certification. Beginning in 2020, certification became a requirement and companies without certification incur a daily fine. The few issues that have thus far emerged, such as the burdensomeness of the process for managers, are start-up problems, moreover, not long-term consequences. And what’s more: the system has stimulated both-in-firm and societal discussions about how jobs are valued, based on what criteria, and whether these criteria are still relevant in the current society and labor market.

It’s an open secret: philanthropy today is top-heavy and insular. A glance at the world’s largest foundations and impact investment funds reveals that decision-makers tend to be disproportionately white, male, and from backgrounds of privilege. And decisions tend to be made in a closed, opaque way.

In Letting Go, Ben Wrobel and Meg Massey tell the story of the funders who have chosen to cede decision-making power to people with lived experience of the problem at hand. The stories range from a global foundation run by and for young feminist activists, to a neighborhood loan fund in Boston controlled by working-class residents of color.

As this book reveals, it’s not only possible to shift power in philanthropy and impact investing – it’s imperative in a world where inequality is reaching a breaking point.

From the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA). This report presents the methodology of the Gender Benchmark, an in-depth evaluation of companies on gender equality and women’s empowerment. The first public ranking of companies, as well as the results from the first application of this methodology, will be published in September 2020 and will present how the apparel industry’s most influential companies address gender equality and women’s empowerment. Ultimately, the Gender Benchmark will enable all stakeholders, from consumers and investors to employees and business leaders beyond the apparel sector, to make informed decisions and encourage stronger corporate impact on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

From Equality Check. Equality Check is a platform where employees can leave anonymous reviews about equal opportunity, workplace culture, work/life balance, the management's commitment to diversity and more. Equality Check’s goal is to create a better workplace for everyone through transparency and accountability. The platform is always anonymous.

Employers benefit from becoming aware of how their employees feel about their culture, and those who score well will be rewarded by having a platform to attract the best talent from a diverse candidate pool. For employers who want to improve, we have developed tools to support them. Our unique approach combines qualitative and quantitative data for workplaces to go from insight to action.

From University of Toronto. This Coursera couse is aimed at helping the student become an Expert in Gender Analytics. Apply inclusive analytic techniques and human-centred design to generate innovative products, services, processes and policies using intersectional gender-based insights. Students will examine how policies, products, services & processes have gendered outcomes that miss out on opportunities or create needless risks; get comfortable with concepts such as sex, gender, gender identity & intersectionality, and how seeing through these lenses can lead to innovation; learn qualitative & quantitative analytical techniques to uncover intersectional gender-based insights, paying special attention to unheard voices; and use human-centred design to create innovative solutions that will help the student become a transformational leader.

From WOCAN. The W+ Standard, created by WOCAN, is the first women-specific standard that measures women’s empowerment in a transparent and quantifiable manner, gives a monetary value to results and creates a new channel to direct financial resources to women.

The W+ Standard measures six domains that are critical for women’s empowerment: Time savings, Income & Assets, Health, Leadership, Education & Knowledge and Food Security. These were determined together with rural women from Nepal and Kenya. Methods were developed to measure and quantify progress for each of these domains.

By Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen. This book is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.

The Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has now completed an extensive research, engagement and outreach process to determine the potential of a menstrual health market (the market) across the Pacific Island countries.

In September 2018 the Criterion Institute, supported by DFAT and Pacific Readiness for Investment in Social Enterprise (Pacific RISE), facilitated a four-day workshop in Melbourne, Australia. The workshop brought together a diverse range of social and business actors focused on improving menstrual health management (MHM) in the Asia-Pacific region to understand and overcome inefficiencies and obstacles in the menstrual health market across the region. The workshop focused on understanding the challenges faced by local social enterprises and identifying opportunities to improve market performance, and how appropriate types of capital could increase local access to menstrual health products. Attention was also paid to the role public and private actors play in facilitating universal access to menstrual products and addressing systemic socio-cultural, educational and environmental barriers to menstrual health across the region.

The workshop brought together 43 participants from 13 countries: Australia, Fiji, Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Samoa, Timor-Leste, United Kingdom, United States of America, and Vanuatu.

This report presents lessons learned from menstrual health actors working in the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the local context of island-based nations. The first of its kind, it should be read as a unique case-study that captures the specific menstrual health challenges faced by countries with dispersed populations across large geographic locations with limited income and commercial access. It explores how innovative investment can be a means of facilitating a new market opportunity, enabling improved access to necessary healthcare products, and support venture creation for women-led businesses.

From Gender and the Economy. This Self-Assessment Survey guides you through the process of understanding your own competency levels for Gender Analytics, and identifies your strengths as well as areas to improve. These competencies are outlined in the Gender Analysis Competency Framework document.

This Self-Assessment is designed for your own learning purposes. The results will help you set learning goals during the program and may be used as reference when working on your Personal Development Plan. Results will not be shared with other learners.

From Gender and the Economy. The Gender Analysis Competency Framework is a description of the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to conduct gender analysis. The framework outlines the core competencies for varying levels of experience.

The Framework is broken into three sections:

1. The 5 W’s (What, Why, Where, When and Who of Gender Analysis)

2. How: Applying Gender Analysis

3. Organizational and Cultural Support

While the competencies are separated out into individual categories, they are clearly interrelated.

From Provenance. Every day, we buy products that impact our planet. Opaque supply chains are devastating environments and compromising the wellbeing of people, animals and communities. Each product and business is different, but rarely do we have the information we need to make positive choices about what to buy.

Provenance empowers brands to make the sourcing and impact behind their products transparent. We exist to enable citizens to access and trust in business sustainability efforts beyond today’s marketing hype. With our software, businesses can easily gather and present information and stories about products and their supply chains, including verified data to support them. By connecting this information to things - in store, on pack and online, we can all discover the origin, journey and impact of our products.

From University of Massachusetts Amherst. In this study of IBM’s LGBT+ self-identification practice, we inaugurate a series of case studies of diversity and inclusion policies and practices adopted by innovative companies.

This report and the series are designed to explore the business rationale and goals of IBM and other companies when adopting inclusive policies and practices, to assess the impact of the policies and practices, and to provide insight for employers who might learn from the experiences of innovators. The series will also serve learning goals for students and other relevant practitioners. After a brief introduction, this report describes how IBM’s selfID process works. The second section describes how IBM arrived at this moment, and the third and fourth sections describe implementation and the uses of the data. The final section looks ahead to the future of the practice.

From Criterion Institute. The success of the field of gender lens investing is dependent on the elevation of translators and translation: individuals, organizations, and processes that facilitate understanding between gender and finance expertise. The accumulation of a wider variety of voices in decision-making is needed to improve both the financial returns and the gender and social impact of the program designs in the field.

By Cathy Clark, Jed Emerson, Ben Thornley. This book offers precise details on what, exactly, impact investing entails, embodied in the experiences and best and proven practices of some of the world's most successful impact investors, across asset classes, geographies and areas of impact. The book discusses the parameters of impact investing in unprecedented detail and clarity, providing both context and tools to those eager to engage in the generational shift in the way finance and business is being approached in the new era of Collaborative Capitalism.

The book presents a simple thesis with clarity and conviction: "Impact investing can be done successfully. This is what success looks like, and this is what it requires." With much-needed lessons for practitioners, the authors view impact investing as a harbinger of a new, more "multilingual" (cross-sector), transparent, and accountable form of economic leadership.