Africa Gender Policy Briefs
75 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 12
-
Publication
Coping with COVID-19 Shocks in Western Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09)In Western Uganda, women farmers and their households were facing widespread agricultural and non-agricultural income shocks in September 2020, indicating a protracted crisis. To cope with these shocks, many households liquidated productive agricultural assets. Women who had higher decision-making power within the household before the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, appeared to cope better with post-outbreak shocks by engaging in more income-generating activities and having better food security in the household. -
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
Top Policy Lessons in Agriculture
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03)This policy brief summarizes key policy lessons from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab on ways to empower women farmers. -
Publication
GIL Top Policy Lessons on Increasing Women’s Youth Employment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)Young women in Africa are less likely to be employed than young men, as a result of gaps in access to resources such as skills, time, and capital, and due to underlying social norms. Adolescence is a particularly critical time to intervene, as teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school can have severe impacts on future employment and earnings with significant consequences on their lives. At the macroeconomic level, investing in adolescent girls is also crucial for Sub-Saharan Africa`s demographic dividend. -
Publication
GIL Top Policy Lessons on Empowering Adolescent Girls
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)Adolescent girls face multiple challenges that restrict their horizons, often having to make decisions about employment and their fertility at an early age, and with limited formal education opportunities. With lower levels of education than men, girls are often less equipped for work. Additionally, a plethora of expected domestic responsibilities limit their time for income-generating opportunities. A range of gender innovation lab (GIL) studies across Sub-Saharan Africa have demonstrated the potential of girls’ empowerment programs to change the life trajectories of young women even across a variety of contexts. These programs typically combine community-based girls clubs, life-skills training, vocational training, and sometimes financial literacy and microcredit access, for young women. In addition to implementation in countries such as Uganda and Tanzania, these programs have also helped create a buffer from conflict for young women in South Sudan and during the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone - showing that they are beneficial even across fragile contexts. -
Publication
Empowering Women Through Equal Land Rights: Experimental Evidence From Rural Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-04)Traditional customary land tenure systems often limit women’s land rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.In an ongoing experiment in rural Uganda, we offered households fully-subsidized land titles and basic information about the benefits of land titling.Providing additional gender information and making the offer conditional on female co-tilting raised the take up of joint titles to about 76 percent and 89 percent, respectively, without dampening overall demand for titling. -
Publication
Empowering Girls Triggers Their Brothers to Compete: Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-10)This brief has key messages through an experiment in Uganda, we find that empowering adolescent girls triggers a surge in their brothers’ competitiveness.Understanding preferences for competition is important because competitiveness is a predictor of labor market outcomes. To examine gender differences in preference for competition, the World Bank’s Africa GenderInnovation Lab, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Maryland and ColumbiaUniversity, launched a lab-in-the-field experiment within a randomized control trial of BRAC’scommunity-based Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) program in Uganda.The ELA program simultaneously provided vocational and life skills training for girls aged 14 to 20. An impact evaluation of ELA showed that it empowered girls along economic and social dimensions: the program increased girls’ participation in self employment, improved girls’ control over their bodies, and shifted deep rooted gender norms held by adolescent girls in communities that participated in the program. Four years after the implementation began, we used a lab-in-the-field experiment to compare communities that received ELA with those that did not. The aim of this experiment was to test whether girl’s empowerment would have a direct impact on girls’ or boys’ competitiveness. To measure preferences for competition, we implemented the experimental protocol of Niederle and Vesterlund (2007). More specifically, participants were asked to select a compensation scheme before performing a simple task, from which we identified their taste to compete. They either chose to be paid according to a competitive tournament scheme or a non competitive piece-rate scheme. The experiment was designed to control for a host of factors such as individual differences in ability, overconfidence, risk aversion, and altruism. Our findings highlight the impact of gender equality on gender differences in competitiveness: when boys are faced with more empowered sisters, they increase their competitiveness. This suggests that the benefits of adolescent girls’ empowerment programs may spill over beyond the participating girls themselves to their brothers. More work needs to be done to understand if the changed behavior in brothers will have persistent effects on girls in the future. -
Publication
As Good as the Company They Keep?: Improving Farmers’ Social Networks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03)Extension services have a history of being relatively expensive and not always effective. At the same time, studies show that informal social networks can be very beneficial in helping increase productivity. In Uganda, the authors tested the value of informal social networks for women farmers by connecting the least-productive 30 percent to some of the most productive women farmers in their own villages. Results show significant gains in productivity indicating that the path to better outcomes is contained within their own community. Women learned the agricultural information at least as well in a network setting as in a more intensive, formal extension setting. On average, the social network intervention was less costly and more effectively targeted women and the least productive farmers than traditional extension services. By exploiting the power of social ties, social network interventions offer a lower-cost alternative to traditional agricultural training programs and can be particularly effective at improving the productivity of women. The results of the study featured in this brief are particularly relevant to policymakers in Sub-Saharan Africa, where productivity differentials still exist between males and females, and women are less frequently targeted for training. -
Publication
Costing the Gender Gap
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12)In sub-Saharan Africa women comprise a large proportion of the agricultural labor force, yet they are consistently found to be less productive than male farmers. The gender gap in agricultural productivity-measured by the value of agricultural produce per unit of cultivated land-ranges from 4-25 percent, depending on the country and the crop.1 The World Bank Africa Gender Innovation Lab, UN Women, and the UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative jointly produced a report to quantify the cost of the gender gap and the potential gains from closing that gap in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. This report illustrates why the gender gap matters. Closing the gender gap of 28 percent in Malawi, 16 percent in Tanzania and 13 percent in Uganda could result in gross gains to GDP, along with other positive development outcomes, such as reduced poverty and greater food security. However, it is important to stress that these potential gains do not come without cost. Closing the gender gap will require changing existing or designing new policies, which may require additional resources. -
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.