2026 Gender IFI Summer School
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The Gender IFI Summer School, organised by the Gender IFI civil society collective, brings together regional and global organisations working to advance economic justice, particularly from a feminist perspective, to discuss the IFIs’ impact on women’s rights and wellbeing, as well as sharing strategies and tactics to push back amongst participants.
In 2026, the six free online learning sessions featured experienced speakers teaching about how international financial institutions (IFIs) impact women’s rights, plus the sharing of advocacy and mobilising tactics to rise up against them amongst participants.
Schedule & recordings
Session 1. Introduction to feminist macroeconomics
During this is introductory session on the link between gender and macroeconomics, participants were inducted on the gendered impact of global economic governance and policies and their subsequent influence on domestic economic policies. Women and girls, in all their diversity, face unfair treatment based on their gender, leading to inequalities in rights, opportunities and social status, including the feminization of poverty. Global economic policymaking, from finance, debt, trade to fiscal and monetary rules, perpetuates gender injustice. These systems are far from neutral, but rather profoundly shaped by colonial, patriarchal, and neoliberal legacies that rely on unpaid or underpaid care labour disproportionately undertaken by women. This session discussed the need for structural change, demanding sustained feminist scrutiny and rights-based alternatives. Watch the recording
Session 2. From commons to commodities: Food, water and seed sovereignty
As climate change intensifies droughts and water scarcity, and conflict reshapes global supply chains, food, water and seed sovereignty have become urgent battlegrounds. Yet these crises are not simply environmental or humanitarian – they are fundamentally shaped by financial markets. This webinar examined how water, food, and seed sovereignty intersect under the dual pressures of climate breakdown and geopolitical instability. The session explored the mechanisms through which financialisation operates and the real-world impacts on communities and ecosystems. Beyond diagnosis, it discussed what civil society can do: documenting financialisation’s harms, building accountability and advancing alternative models of resource governance rooted in justice, equity, and collective control. Watch the recording
Session 3. The Rabat Roadmap: Militarism in the global economic structure
As part of the Rabat Roadmap Framework and the ongoing political and movement-building work of the 2026 MENAFem Annual Feminist Economics School in Tunisia, this session brought together leading feminist advocates Susan Nada, Priya Lukka, Haneen Shaheen and Aswat Nissa. Moderated by Iemane Cherif, the session unpacked how debt, austerity, global imperialism and ongoing wars continue to shape economic, political, and climate realities across the MENA region. Through discussions on feminist economics, climate justice, labor, debt, economic sovereignty and just transition, the session critically explored how colonial and imperial economic systems, militarization, occupation and extractive energy politics are deeply interconnected with climate injustice and shrinking public resources. The conversation challenged externally imposed “green” transitions that reproduce inequality and dependency rather than delivering justice for communities in the region. Watch the recording
Session 4. The necropolitical nature of neoliberalism
This session interrogated macroeconomic policy not as a neutral technical framework, but as a political ideology that determines whose lives, labour and futures are valued. Drawing on feminist political economy, decolonial theory and necropolitics, it examined how austerity, debt, privatization, extractivism and fiscal conditionalities produce gendered and multi-generational inequalities, particularly through the erosion of rights and gender-responsive public services. Together, the session aimed to expose economic crisis as a managed system of control rather than an inevitable outcome, trace the gendered impacts of neoliberal macroeconomic violence and re-politicize collective feminist resistance as a pathway toward justice, equity and collective wellbeing. Watch the recording
Session 5. Women on the frontlines: Economic imperialism and resistance
This session focused on the Asia-pacific region. The current international financial architecture mirrors historical colonial systems, with trade, legal frameworks and financial mechanisms structured to maintain the outflow of wealth from the Global South to imperialist powers. The IMF-WB continue to push neoliberal policies that push communities into debt, contribute to widespread poverty and inaccessibility of resources and services, and economic instability mostly impacting grassroots and global South women. This session was organised to unpack and discuss the implications of the current international financial architecture centred on neoliberal trade in both goods and services, and women’s labour and rights. We heard from women workers affected by both SAPs and labour conditionalities, as well as communities affected by extractive programmes by the IMF-WB. During the session, participants also exchange of experiences, analyses and stories of resistance. Watch the recording
Session 6. Building counterpower: Feminist economic alternatives
This session is a crossover event with AWID, FEMNET, NAWI and partners’ feminist school on alternatives. In the midst of a deepening economic and climate crisis, international financial institutions continue to weaponize debt by pushing for disastrous austerity measures across the Global Majority world. Yet there is mounting evidence of the ways in which austerity is facilitating intensified resource extraction, energy poverty, disrupting the social organization of care and dismantling local economies in the Global Majority while enriching corporations in the Global North. This webinar advanced feminist perspectives on austerity, extractivism and social reproduction to enable participants to understand how feminist economic alternatives confront and challenge the neoliberal economic system. This session also explored how feminist alternatives are shifting the balance of power and building economies grounded in care, justice, solidarity and the sustainability of life. Watch the recording
For more information about the Gender IFI Summer School, watch past editions or get in touch please check our GEM page below.