At a Crossroads: Transformative Power and Precarity — Why Gender Professionals Are Essential in Today’s Humanitarian Response

In 2025, the global movement for gender justice stands at a critical crossroads. As one road leads toward deepening poverty, rising backlash, and weakened rights, the other offers a trajectory of progress: safer societies, more resilient economies, and a fairer, more inclusive future for all. The choices made by governments, institutions, and civil society today will shape not only the next five years, but generations to come.

The Shrinking Landscape for Gender Justice

Today’s backdrop is not one of easy momentum. Aid budgets for gender equality and women’s rights are shrinking at a historic rate, driven by the rise of right-wing governments and deepening global polarization. Countries once heralded for their feminist leadership are retreating:

• Sweden’s reversal: Once a global model for feminist foreign policy, Sweden has seen its right-leaning government cancel the policy, halve its aid budget, and redirect over 1.6 billion SEK initially meant for long-term feminist development work to humanitarian response in Ukraine and domestic interests. This has left highly effective programs supporting women’s rights, survivors of violence, and grassroots organizations in the Global South without support or shutdown entirely.​

• The US aid cliff: In a sweeping move, the Trump administration abruptly dismantled most USAID programming, slashing $60 billion in foreign aid. Essential support for gender, health, and education vanished almost overnight, with ripple effects across dozens of countries. Estimates say these cuts could cause up to 14 million additional deaths by 2030, disproportionately impacting women, girls, and marginalized communities.​

• Across the board cuts: The UK Foreign Office has announced a 42% reduction in gender and education funding for 2025–26, closing girls’ education programs, eliminating women’s health funds, and exacerbating vulnerabilities for millions in fragile settings.​

Mainstreaming gender within existing programming is too often offered as a substitute, but experience shows that without dedicated, long-term funding, and gender professionals guiding the use of gender and power lens, genuine transformation stalls. Civil society reminds us: “You can’t fix what you can’t see”—and many of the most promising, locally-driven solutions are being suffocated just as need grows.

Why This Moment Demands Gender Professionals

In this precarious context, the role of gender professionals becomes not only more urgent—but absolutely essential.

• Gender professionals are the engine of transformation, they bridge technical expertise with community realities. They conduct rigorous gender and power analyses, map exclusions, and target resources where they can have the most profound ripple effects.

• They ensure humanitarian responses don’t repeat past mistakes—moving beyond checklists to center intersectionality, voice, and leadership from women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people.

• Training local staff to become gender experts converts top-down aid into locally-led change. In Myanmar, for example, six years of programming showed that empowering women leaders in disaster response, education, and camp management didn’t just shift operations— it rebuilt trust, improved outcomes, and sparked further innovation.

• Their work is what transforms a promise on paper into measurable change. They design participatory mechanisms, track results, and drive organizations to stay honest about progress and setbacks, anchoring accountability.

The Evidence for Urgency — and Hope

Global data underscores the stakes:

• 10% of women still live in extreme poverty. By 2030, 351 million women and girls could remain trapped in the cycle if trends do not change.​

• Women are more likely to go hungry—26.1% vs 24.2% of men—representing 64 million more women at risk of food insecurity.​

• Aid cuts, especially from major donors, are already disrupting health services, education, and protection for the world’s most vulnerable populations, with the OECD projecting as much as a 17% decline in total development assistance in 2025.​

Yet where real investment continues, the payoff is extraordinary. Studies show that closing gender gaps could add as much as $342 trillion to the global economy by 2050. When countries strengthen their laws and justice systems, rates of violence against women fall 2.5 times. The future is not preordained: investing in gender justice, and in the professionals who make it real, is the best growth—and humanitarian—strategy.​

From Comfortable Mainstreaming to Bold Transformation

Now is the moment to shift from comfortable mainstreaming to transformative action:

• Conduct robust gender and power analysis for every intervention.

• Lead with intersectionality, inclusion, and local ownership—amplify grassroots voices and leadership in responses.

• Track, evaluate, and transparently share successes and failures—filling the gender evidence gap.

• Advocate for and secure dedicated, flexible funding for gender transformative work, resisting the retreat from long-term investment.

• Let gender professionals be at the center of every humanitarian response—recognized, resourced, and empowered.

The Road We Choose

Every crisis is a crossroads. Aid cuts and political retrenchment threaten to knock out decades of progress in a matter of months. But gender professionals—and the movements behind them—show us a path forward that transforms not only responses to crisis, but the structural roots of exclusion and violence.

The invitation is clear: choose transformation over comfort, bold evidence-based investment over rhetoric, and feminist leadership as the standard, not the exception. The future of humanitarian response—and the dignity of millions—depends on it.