Africa Gender Innovation Lab
83 items available
Permanent URI for this collection
The Gender Innovation
Lab (GIL) conducts impact
evaluations of development
interventions in Sub-Saharan
Africa, seeking to generate
evidence on how to close
the gender gap in earnings,
productivity, assets and
agency. The GIL team is
currently working on over
50 impact evaluations in 21
countries with the aim of
building an evidence base
with lessons for the region.
Items in this collection
1 - 10 of 10
-
Publication
Unlocking the Potential of Women Entrepreneurs in Uganda: A Brief of Policy Interventions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08-26)Private sector development is an integral channel through which countries can better leverage the productive potential of the youth bulge, support job creation, and maintain social stability. Entrepreneurship already plays an important role in Sub-Saharan Africa, where forty-two percent of the nonagricultural labor force is self-employed or is an employer, the highest rate in the world. Women business owners in Uganda face several gender-specific barriers to their enterprise performance, including lower levels of innovation, lower use of capital and labor, and segregation into lower-value sectors. This brief focuses on the policy interventions that can help empower women entrepreneurs across Uganda. -
Publication
Supporting Women Throughout the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Emergency Response and Economic Recovery
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04)This brief highlight evidence from the Africa gender innovation lab and other promising research on mechanisms that can help protect the lives and livelihoods of women and girls - at the household level, in firms and farms, and during adolescence - in the context of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic. -
Publication
Making It Easier for Women in Malawi to Formalize Their Firms and Access Financial Services
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01-28)The rate of informal firms is high in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially for those that are women-owned and in the poorest countries, despite a total of 107 business regulatory reforms recorded by Doing Business across 40 economies in the region. Through an experiment in Malawi, we established an effective and replicable design to offer informal firms support to formalize, costing much less than the typical private sector development intervention. The study shows that one of the primary barriers to registration for women-owned firms is transaction costs. When registration is madevirtually costless, an overwhelming number of women-owned firms (73 percent) choose to register. However, when offered the chance to engage in costless registration for taxes, almost no firms select to pursue this opt ion. Combining business registration with an information session at a bank including the offer of a business bank account leads to an increased use of formal financial services, and results in increases in women owned firms sales and profits of 28 percent and 20 percent respectively. On the other hand, business registration on its own is not as effective in improving access to financial services and does not result in enhanced sales and profits. -
Publication
Working Under Pressure: Improving Labor Productivity through Financial Innovation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12-17)In developing countries, financial transfers within social and kin networks are ubiquitous and frequent. Though these transfers have social benefits, pressure to redistribute income can introduce a disincentive to work by reducing the payoff of exerting effort. This comes at a potential cost for the overall efficiency of the economy. The authors developed a financial innovation to study the impact of this redistributive pressure on workers’ labor supply and productivity. This innovation, a direct-deposit commitment savings account, enabled workers to convert productivity increases into private savings which cannot be accessed by others. In the first phase of their project, workers offered the direct-deposit commitment savings account increased their labor productivity and earnings by ten percent, which translates into an eighteen percent increase for workers who opened an account. The effect appears to be driven by workers increasing effort while on the job. Preliminary results show that the visibility of an account to one’s social network and the degree of redistributive pressure a worker faces are strong determinants of account take-up. This suggests that tackling the underlying cause for redistributive norms, the lack of consumption smoothing mechanisms, could improve output and growth in developing countries by addressing the root cause of the high demand for commitment savings products. -
Publication
Are Mobile Savings the Silver Bullet to Help Women Grow Their Businesses?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-09)In Tanzania and Indonesia, we promoted the expansion of mobile savings accounts among women micro-entrepreneurs and provided them with business related training. In doing so, we simultaneously relaxed supply- and demand side constraints to savings that women might face. In both countries, the training enhanced the impact of promoting mobile savings. In Indonesia it led women to save more overall, including a nascent use of mobile accounts, and report greater decision making power within the household. In Tanzania, it led to substantially higher mobile savings, new businesses and products, more capital investment, labor effort, and better business practices. However, these short-term impacts have yet to translate into higher business profits. In Indonesia, we observe increased household welfare, but no discernible effects on business outcomes shortly after the training ended. In Tanzania, the increased business investments were not accompanied by greater profitability. -
Publication
Algorithms for Inclusion: Data Driven Lending for Women Owned SMEs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06)All over the world, women have less access to credit than men. Because of both discriminatory property laws and unwritten social customs, women are less likely than men to own high-value assets that can be used as collateral to secure loans. Financial institutions in developing countries rely on heavy collateral requirements because they don’t have enough information about their borrowers. New technologies - many emerging from financial technology (fintech) startups in the Silicon Valley - have the potential to generate data on borrowers that can replace traditional collateral requirements, and unlock finance for women. In Ethiopia, the authors explored introducing fintech that can harness the data that financial institutions are already sitting on. The technology focuses on digitizing hard-copy loan application files of previous borrowers to identify trends and characteristics associated with repayment, and predict creditworthiness of new borrowers. Fintech solutions can viably address the collateral constraint for women borrowers, and can work even in low tech environments. But technology adoption isn’t easy, and assessing the readiness of financial institutions to adopt fintech and embark on technological change is a critical first step. -
Publication
Financing Women Entrepreneurs in Ethiopia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-09)The challenges faced by women-owned enterprises in the developing world are substantial. Only one-third of the world’s SMEs in the formal sector are currently run by women, and women owned businesses typically underperform men’s. Across countries and contexts, access to finance is continuously identified as the leading constraint faced by women entrepreneurs. While finance is a challenge for male and female enterprises alike, the difficulties are amplified for women, who are less likely to own assets which can serve as collateral andare more likely to suffer exclusion based on unequal property rights or discriminatory regulations, laws and customs. An estimated 70 percent of women-owned SMEs in the formal sector in developing countries are unserved or underserved by financial institutions.This amounts to a financing gap of 285 billion dollars. A diverse range of economic research shows that addressing this financing gap and investing in women-owned enterprises is one of the highes treturn opportunities available in emerging markets.As they grow, women-owned enterprises enhance labor participation and boost broad-based economic growth. In particular, due to higher female unemployment rates and the fact that women are more likely to hire other women, the growth offemale-owned enterprises can be a key driver in reducing high overall unemployment rates. -
Publication
From Cash to Accounts: Switching How Women Save in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-07)In Sub Saharan Africa women are often not protecting their savings through formal devices but instead keeping their savings in more vulnerable savings options. After participating in a savings promotion program, women are more likely to save in semi-formal savings options. Participants moved their cash to semi-formal saving options, such as ROSCAs, but did not go as far as moving to regular bank accounts or other formal savings options. The pilot identified subgroups that may be especially receptive for informational savings campaigns. Women who were illiterate or had been robbed or stolen from in the past one and a half years show significant increases in take-up of formal savings options after participating in the program. The savings mobilization program resulted in reallocation rather than accumulation of monetary wealth. -
Publication
Making it Easier for Women in Malawi to Formalize Their Firms and Access Financial Services
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-03)The global rate of informal firms is high, especially for those that are women-owned and in the poorest countries, despite 149 economies implementing 368 reforms to simplify the registration process in a recent ten-year period. Through an experiment in Malawi, the author established an effective and replicable design to offer informal firms support to formalize, costing much less than the typical private sector development intervention. What works in the short-term is combining business registration with an information session at a bank including the offer of a business bank account. This led to women entrepreneurs increasing usage of bank accounts for business-only purposes, financial record keeping, and access to other financial services including insurance. Informal firms are smaller and less productive than formal ones, and their informal status is often associated with a number of costs, including less access to finance. Although 75 percent of the countries included in the Doing Business project have adopted at least one reform making it easier to register a business since 2004, informality remains very prevalent, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. This may lead many to believe that entrepreneurs are not interested in registering their firms, and that if they could only be convinced to formalize it would lead to great benefits for their business. -
Publication
Gender Gaps at the Enterprise Level: Evidence from South Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-09)Female-owned small to medium businesses in the Western Cape Province in South Africa are less productive, generate lower revenues and have less employees than male-owned enterprises. In this brief, we use the baseline survey for an impact evaluation of a business development services program to identify why these differences exist and explore paths towards policy interventions to overcome them. Author conclude that the concentration of businesses in low performing sectors, the lack of commitment to the business, the intertwining of household and business responsibilities, and access to finance can be important barriers to the growth of women-headed enterprises. Author suggests targeted alternative interventions to address these constraints and recommend comparing their effectiveness through rigorous evaluations. Author argue that the gender differences identified in the performance of Small, Medium, and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) in this Province of South Africa can be due to a combination of: 1) the concentration of women-entrepreneurs in a small number of low-performing sectors, 2) firms being seen by entrepreneurs as an interim solution, 3) the intertwining of household and enterprise money, and 4) credit constraints.