Feminist Reflections on the 2025 IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings: A time for (r)evolution – who leads?

By Fiana Arbab, a Bangladeshi-Muslim-American transnational feminist organizer and advocate

We continue to witness the supercharging of inequality: Billionaire wealth rose three times faster in 2024 than in 2023, and five trillionaires are now expected within a decade. Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990. In fact, the World Bank noted that global extreme poverty increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and while the rates have now returned to pre-pandemic levels, global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill in the last decade due to several interconnected crises. And we know that gender marginalized groups, namely women and girls – especially those who are racially and ethnically marginalized, are bearing the brunt of these crises. Harms are translated through several forms: the care crisis; increased interpersonal gender-based violence; and when governments slash spending on public services like health and social protection spending (e.g., austerity), as the data shows is happening at alarming rates, it is women and girls who suffer most. These systemic violences are perpetuated by the current economic system and scaffolded by the international financial architecture (IFA), enabled in large part by international financial institutions (IFIs), ensuring women are unable to breathe.  

Within the arena of the 4th UN Financing for Development forum, IFIs particularly the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) scrambled to put forward convincing narratives about their role in unlocking the ever-so-elusive “billions to trillions” (which World Bank Chief Economist Indermit Gill has even labeled a “fantasy”) and promises to reform in the face of failures to meet global development goals. However, IFIs neglect to address their original sin – these institutions were designed with colonial principles in mind, and they remain largely colonial in character today. So while the Compromiso de Seville (true in nature, a piecemeal compromise) presents some openings for more equitable and rights-based financing on the surface, with the United States (under a Trump presidency) holding the biggest voting share in these institutions, the dynamics foreshadow harmful policies like austerity and financialization of essential services gaining even more support in the World Bank and IMF over the next 4 years. Relying on the IFIs then to deliver on development while they retain the same paradigms risks poisoning the IFA further. All the while, 3.3 billion people now live in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on health and education, and the most food-insecure countries have seen the highest increases. Debt servicing is expected to consume 55% of low-income countries’ budgets in sub-Saharan Africa by 2025. While having to make tough financing (for development?) decisions, nation states have increasingly chosen to spend precious public funds on the military – military spending rose by $1.5 trillion in 2024 while global aid for gender equality and peace declined by 7%. 

Enclosed by these shadows, the managing director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, suggested during her curtain raiser speech at the 2025 IMF Annual meetings that the global economy is coping “better than feared, but worse than we need.” According to Georgieva, the “economic resilience we have seen this year” is thanks to “good policy,” private sector adaptability, avoidance of a tariff/ trade-war in its fullest form, and supportive financial conditions. Her continued cognitive distortion enables the IMF and the governments it advises to ignore the devastating impacts of the dominant policy prescriptions on struggling economies and sardonically push regressive taxes to finance public services while throttling public investment. Alongside offering fig-leaf solutions like social spending floors (e.g., for every dollar the IMF encouraged countries to spend on public goods, it required countries to cut four times that amount through austerity measures), the IMF emphasized a requirement of higher private sector productivity for “durable growth”. 

The WB has followed suit, centering a Jobs agenda in yet another annual Meetings. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has shared warnings about the Bank’s continued push to deregulate labor standards through its flagship B-Ready report—really, a chameleon of the scandalous Doing Business. The B-Ready report has no gendered analysis; no inequality analysis (even with the new Corporate Vision indicator on inequality); and no metric regarding the ability of workers to unionize/ organize/ associate, regardless of international standards on business and human rights. In the biggest irony of all, the B-Ready report ranked Colombia among the top 10 economies assessed, celebrated for its regulatory framework and public services, while being ranked as the number one deadliest country for trade unionists and human rights defenders. While fiscal space gets eaten up by debt, including colonial and illegal, IFIs continue to urge the global south to pay-to-play with the world’s wealthiest people in pursuit of jobs that will not transform the lives of the masses because they neither guarantee adequate decent work nor decent wages.  

True transformation comes from both meeting the moment and acknowledging who is best positioned to. It is inappropriate of these IFIs to attempt to continue to reassert themselves as the global pulpit of cooperative international finance and economies while emboldening greedy actors. In parallel, the multilateral system only has as much merit as it enables liberatory frameworks to achieve human development goals. It is therefore imperative to feed, heal, and enable those who are most impacted by current harmful economic and social paradigms –through progressive taxation, ending austerity, cancelling debt, challenging privatization of services fundamental to human life, and funding feminist movements—to lead us towards the better future we all envision. Development cannot occur through financing and metrics alone, delinked from lived conditions. We must follow the bravest, most creative, joyful, and nuanced voices our global community has to offer for revolutionary solutions.