Another day, another stupid example of how the UK’s foreign aid budget has been spent.
Taxpayers were charged £4,809,498 for the project Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Policy and Practice (GRRIPP) - Networking Plus Partnering for Resilience.
This was funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which was awarded £1.5 billion of the UK’s Official Development Assistance between 2016-21 (and was wound down in 2022). The GCRF was designed to “addres[s] the United Nations sustainable development goals.”
Taking place at University College London between Nov 19 - Apr 24, the GRRIPP Network+ aimed to “build an international, network of scholars, policy makers and practitioners to promote gender and intersectionality.”
It was led by Professor Maureen Fordham, whose UCL profile highlights what United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) she has met:
A UCL webpage about the now-closed GRRIPP project explains that it used “four interconnecting themes” (even though I can see five…). These include “Critical Theory” and “Decoloniality”:
Its abstract is filled with paragraphs of leftist gobbledygook such as:
We seek to establish a radical vision which begins and centres upon gender and intersectionality rather than adding it, post hoc, to domains and sectors. The primary challenge we identify is to embed gender and intersectionality in resilience thinking, policy making and practice through better understanding the drivers of gender inequality of risk and resilience in order to build gender responsive resilience (GRR).
&
Our horizontally-structured "ideas space" allows for critical and situated perspectives and indigenous and de-colonial knowledges to emerge based on, inter alia, non-Anglophone sources and lived experiences.
&
Beneficiaries will also include local practitioners and activists, those working in NGOs and with social movements, and also educators from grass roots to university levels.
&:
A conscious aim of GRRIPP is to decolonise knowledge production and provide levels of autonomy for regional teams which we hope will have impact in our regions of influence.
What a load of utter nonsense! You can read the whole thing here.
The project’s “Outcomes” aren’t much better. These include a “GRRIPP training workshop on Gender and Territory” in South America…
… and “Elaboration of five local climate change adaptation plans with gender mainstreaming in five municipalities in Argentina.”
A YouTube page about the project explains that it “commissioned more than 20 research projects across Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and Southern Africa”, with videos on subjects such as “Moving towards a SMART, Inclusive South Asia Disaster & Resilience”:
One of the videos on the YouTube site has as little as 7 views at the time of writing:
And the rest aren’t much better:
Could this be because it’s all total bollocks?
Unfortunately, it’s not the first ridiculous project funded by the GCRF. You can read more here:
Well they can't write comprehensible English, you can't expect them to be able to count!
Our tax payers money obviously means nothing to them. What has it achieved of any benefit, and to whom? As you say, absolute rubbish.