Follow the money

Thirty governments, one screening question, and a girl's schooling in a country most people cannot place becomes a budget line somebody defends every year. Remember how well this works. The rest of the article is about its absence.

Development aid is not counted by asking people what they care about. It is counted by markers. When a donor country reports a project to the OECD, it screens it against a list of policy objectives and records, for each one, whether the project targets it as its principal purpose, as a significant secondary purpose, or not at all. Those screenings are added up, and the resulting totals are what every argument about aid priorities is actually made of.

The gender equality marker was created in the nineteen-nineties and it works. Here is a slice of what it measured in 2022 for DAC members and the EU institutions, in commitments to all recipients.

Read that as an achievement, because it is one. Somebody argued for that instrument, wrote the definitions, persuaded thirty donor governments to screen against it, and now a girl's schooling in a country most people cannot place is a line in a budget that somebody has to defend annually. That is what machinery does. It converts a concern into an obligation with a number attached.

It is also, on the site's standing rule, none of this campaign's business to resent. Nothing in this article proposes that any of the above be reduced, and the register says so in the same words every time.

The argument is not about that column. It is about whether a second one can be counted at all.

Men are not a sector, so they cannot have a marker. Except disability is not a sector either, and it has one. A sex-specific outcome cannot be an aid objective without calling it oppression. Except maternal health is exactly that, and it has one too.

Gender is not the only marker. The DAC maintains a list of other policy objectives that donors screen for, and it can be pulled straight from OECD's own machine rather than from a page describing it. Here it is in full.

Two of those matter more than the rest, because they answer the two objections that are always made.

The first is that men and boys are not a sector, and markers are for sectors. Disability is not a sector. It is a characteristic that cuts across every sector, exactly as sex does, and it has a marker.

The second is that a sex-specific outcome cannot be an object of aid policy without becoming a claim about oppression. RMNCH is maternal health. It is as sex-specific as anything could be, it is not framed as discrimination, and it has a marker, a custodian and annual reporting.

So neither objection survives contact with the list. Both are already answered by things that are already counted. What is absent is not a principle. It is an instrument.

And the consequence of that absence is the thing to be precise about, because it is easy to state carelessly and this site has done so before. The amount of aid spent on men and boys is not zero. It is unmeasurable. No screening question exists that would produce a figure, so nobody, in either direction, can tell you what it is.

We expected to find men used mostly as a means to somebody else's end. Except the data said otherwise, twice, and this is what got published instead.

If no total can be produced, the alternative is to go down to the individual projects and read them. Aid activities are published in a standard called IATI, with titles and descriptions, and they can be searched.

The question, written down before any of it was read: of the money that does name men and boys, how much treats them as the people being helped, and how much treats them as the route to helping somebody else? Engaging men as allies, male involvement in maternal health, working with men to prevent violence against women. That work is often good and often effective and the question is not whether it should exist. The question is whether the two kinds get counted together, because when they are, a men's column can look full while containing very little that is addressed to a man.

Thirty-five thousand activities were swept. After matching on whole words rather than substrings, 378 named men or boys specifically. Each was read and placed in one of five classes, and every one is published with the class it was given, so anyone can dispute a particular call.

The hypothesis was wrong. Beneficiary outnumbers instrument, and by money the gap looked larger still: 82 per cent of the money sat in the beneficiary column.

Except that four fifths of that money is one thing. Voluntary medical male circumcision, funded largely through PEPFAR, accounts for 336 of the 424 million dollars. Take it out and the split is 50.9 per cent instrument against 49.1 per cent beneficiary. A dead heat.

Whether circumcision programmes belong in the beneficiary column is genuinely arguable, and the call is flagged rather than buried. They cut a man's own risk of acquiring HIV by around sixty per cent, which is his benefit. Their programmatic rationale is population-level epidemic control, which is everyone's. Every one of those rows is tagged so a reader can move them and recompute.

Two things nearly went wrong on the way and both are published. Searching descriptions rather than titles returned a project called Empowerment of women as male-specific. And the money split was 84 per cent until somebody noticed that the dataset's dollar columns are zero for euro-denominated activities, which silently deletes most European donors and most of the engaging-men programming they fund.

A campaign that wanted a number rather than an answer could have published either of those and been believed.

Four things the money built, described as achievements because that is what they are. Then four questions about the other column, and nobody can answer any of them, including us.

So far this is arithmetic. Here is what it means, which is a different thing, and it is worth slowing down for because the numbers on this page are large enough to stop meaning anything.

Every figure below is real, checked and linked. None of them is an argument that the money was wrongly spent. Read them as descriptions of what an institution can do once it exists.

Now the honest part, and it is the reason this section is not a comparison table. There is nothing on the other side to put beside them. Not a smaller number. No number, because none of those four things has a counterpart whose subject is men and boys, so there is no line item to name.

The closest thing that exists was made by one person. In 2024 Melinda French Gates gave Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a USD 20 million fund to direct to work on boys and men, as one of twelve leaders each given the same amount to distribute as they saw fit. That is, as far as we can establish, the largest single sum ever directed at this subject, and it came from a private individual rather than any government or institution.

England's first national men's health strategy, published in November 2025, carries GBP 3.6 million over three years for suicide prevention among middle-aged men. That is a real commitment by a real government and it is also, for scale, roughly one two-hundredth of what one Nordic country sends to two UN gender partners in a single year.

Those two figures should not be compared and that is exactly the finding. One is an entity's annual funding, the other is a line inside one country's health budget. They are not comparable because there is no counterpart entity to compare with. The absence is not that men's programmes get less. It is that the category of thing you would measure does not exist.

So, four questions, and the point of them is that nobody can answer any of them, including us.

A reader who finds those questions frustrating has understood the article. They are not rhetorical. They are the questions any competent official would have to answer on day one, and the reason none of them can be answered is that day one has never happened.

A marker would let somebody count. Except counting was never the job. Reading, commissioning, publishing and answering for the result is the job, and no form has ever done that.

It would be easy to end on the marker. It is the cheapest item, the easiest to defend and the hardest to refuse: a screening question, one column in a form thirty governments already complete, about a number they mostly already hold.

That is not what this campaign is asking for, and treating it as the ask has been a habit worth breaking. A marker counts money and does nothing else. It does not open an eight-hundred-page study. It does not notice that a recommendation naming boys never reached the General Assembly. It does not commission the research that would settle an argument, publish an annual figure anyone is obliged to answer for, or tell a government what to do once the number is in.

Every one of those is done, for women and girls, by an institution. UN Women has a founding resolution, an executive board, a budget, a reporting line to the General Assembly and staff whose job is to know. The marker is one bolt in that machine, and pointing at the bolt while the machine is missing is how a campaign talks itself down to something nobody has to act on.

Note the order in that column. The marker is last, not first, because it is a consequence rather than a cause. Nothing gets counted until somebody is responsible for counting it, and nobody is responsible until an institution exists to be responsible.

The body is the ask. The rest follows from it.

And the evidence that no such body exists is this article. Somebody had to open the volume, find the sentence that did not travel, sweep thirty-five thousand aid records and read the three hundred and seventy-eight that name men. That work took an afternoon, it is the only classification of its kind we can find, and it was done by a campaign run in somebody's spare time.

Which is the argument, finally, and it was never about money. Measurement decides what a society is able to think about a group. A harm that is counted becomes a problem with a name, a budget and a profession attached to it. A harm that is not counted becomes a private failing, and the people it happens to are read as having brought it on themselves.

What gets counted becomes findable, and what is findable becomes real to whoever is looking.

That is why the campaign is called UN for Men Too, and not a policy marker for men too.