This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women’s rights and gender equality specialists in international non-governmental development
organisations, as analysed from an insider practitioner perspective. Part 1 identifies the
strategies used and the challenges encountered when Turquet lobbied DFID on its gender
equality policy while struggling to avoid marginalisation within her own organisation, Action
Aid. In Part 2, Smyth describes how she left Oxfam for a year to work in the Asian
Development Bank and uses this experience to consider the strategic opportunities available to a gender specialist working in an NGO such as Oxfam as compared with working in an international finance institution.