Africa Gender Innovation Lab

93 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10986/25446

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.

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Empowering Adolescent Girls in a Crisis Context: Lessons from Sierra Leone in the Time of Ebola
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-07) Bandiera, Oriana; Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Rasul, Imran; Smurra, Andrea
In Sierra Leone, the empowerment and livelihoods for adolescents (ELA) initiative sought to enhance adolescent girls’ social and economic empowerment by providing life skills training, livelihood training, and credit support to start income-generating activities. The Ebola crisis occurred during the project, resulting in curbed implementation. In contrast, younger girls (12 to 17 years old) who resided in communities that benefitted from the program in high Ebola disruption areas were more likely to be in school and saw their numeracy and literacy levels improve. However, as younger women spend less time with men in the presence of ELA, men likely shift their attention to older girls: the evaluation finds an increase in unwanted and transactional sex by older girls in areas highly exposed to the Ebola crisis. As the program was implemented, the Ebola epidemic hit Sierra Leone. First, in an effort to stem the spread of the disease, the government-imposed quarantines, limited travel, and closed public spaces such as markets in certain areas, which significantly impacted the economic activities of men and women. Second, schools were closed for an entire academic year. Finally, Sierra Leone’s limited health resources were diverted into caring for patients and preventing the spread of the epidemic, limiting their ability to attend to other issues such as sexual and reproductive health. These results show how safe spaces interventions can be effective even in the face of large-scale shocks such as Ebola crises as seen in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, as well as other shocks constraining economic and social life, by buffering girls from the adverse effects of crises.
Empowering Women Through Equal Land Rights: Experimental Evidence From Rural Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-04) Cherchi, Ludovica; Goldstein, Markus; Habyarimana, James; Montalvao, Joao; O'Sullivan, Michael; Udry, Chris; Gruver, Ariel
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.
What Are the Economic Costs of Gender Gaps in Ethiopia?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-03) Buehren, Niklas; Gonzalez, Paula; Copley, Amy
Despite Ethiopia’s remarkable economic progress over the past decade, gender gaps in key economic activities - agriculture, entrepreneurship, and wage employment - indicate that challenges remain to realizing the full potential of women’s economic empowerment. Differences in simple averages between men and women show that women lag men by 36 percent in agricultural productivity, by 79 percent in business sales, and by 44 percent in hourly wages. This brief examines the costs of these gender gaps and estimates the potential gains from closing them.
Making It Easier for Women in Malawi to Formalize Their Firms and Access Financial Services
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01-28) Campos, Francisco; Goldstein, Markus; McKenzie, David
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.
Africa Gender Innovation Lab Ethiopia Gender Diagnostic: Building the Evidence Base to Address Gender Inequality in Ethiopia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019) Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Gonzalez, Paula; Hagos, Adiam; Kirkwood, Daniel; Paskov, Patricia; Poulin, Michelle; Raja, Chandni
Ethiopia has made remarkable economic progress over the past decade, achieving high gross domestic product (GDP) growth and dramatically reducing poverty. Despite this success, current gender gaps show that challenges remain to realizing inclusive growth and the full potential of women’s economic empowerment. In Ethiopia, women still lag men on several important economic indicators, including employment rate, agricultural productivity, earnings from self-employment, and wage income. While the Government of Ethiopia has already made significant commitments and investments aiming to close the country’s gender gaps, new data offer an opportunity to generate critical evidence to strategically target these investments. For this reason, the Africa gender innovation lab’s (GIL) Ethiopia gender diagnostic report provides innovative analysis on the root causes and drivers of gender inequality in Ethiopia. Using data from the latest round of the Ethiopia socioeconomic survey (2015-2016) and an established statistical approach, the report examines the country’s gender gaps in employment, agricultural productivity, and income from self- and wage employment. It presents specific policy areas for the government to target in addressing the constraints faced by female workers, farmers, and business owners. The key findings and policy recommendations are discussed in the report.
Working Under Pressure: Improving Labor Productivity through Financial Innovation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12-17) Carranza, Eliana; Donald, Aletheia; Grosset, Florian; Kaur, Supreet
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.
Can Job Training Decrease Women's Self-Defeating Biases? Experimental Evidence from Nigeria
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10) Croke, Kevin; Goldstein, Markus; Holla, Alaka
Gender-based occupational segregation – where women are concentrated in low-paid or low-profit sectors – is a non-trivial source of the gender wage gap worldwide, accounting for as much as 50 percent of the gap in some countries (World Bank 2011). There is evidence that women's biases about their own potential can affect their performance and aspirations. Through an experiment in Nigeria, we found that an information and communications technology (ICT) training resulted in university graduates being 26 percent more likely to work in the ICT sector.
Are Mobile Savings the Silver Bullet to Help Women Grow Their Businesses?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-09) Bastian, Gautam; Bianchi, Iacopo; Buvinic, Mayra; Goldstein, Markus; Jaluka, Tanvi; Knowles, James; Montalvao, Joao; Witoelar, Firman
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.
Investing in Childcare for Women's Economic Empowerment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08) Donald, Aletheia; Campos, Francisco; Vaillant, Julia; Cucagna, Maria Emilia
Two thirds of sub-Saharan Africa’s citizens depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Women make up a large part of the agricultural workforce: in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), over 80 percent of women work in farming compared to 60 percent of men. However, women face a variety of constraints which limit the time they can devote to working or supervising farm labor and reduce the productivity of their plots. Increasing women’s agricultural productivity has the potential not only to improve their own economic status, but also to enhance economic growth and food security in their communities. The Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) used a combination of consultations in the field, desk research, and primary data collection to understand the patterns of time allocation in rural households in Western DRC, and to assess the factors to consider when designing effective interventions aimed at increasing women’s agricultural productivity.
Designing Targeted Business Trainings for Impact: Insights from a Women Entrepreneurs' Program in Tanzania
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-07) Bardasi, Elena; Gassier, Marine; Goldstein, Markus; Holla, Alaka
Business training in low-income countries have scarcely shown impacts on revenues and profits, especially for female entrepreneurs. In this study, we test two kinds of trainings, one basic in-class training and one enhanced version supplemented with individualized coaching, to test their respective impact on women with established small businesses in Tanzania. We found that targeting the right entrepreneurs can improve the effectiveness of a tailored training and even lead to improvements in performance. We also determined that the content and delivery method of business support provided to the female entrepreneurs impact their adoption of business practices.