Africa Gender Innovation Lab
81 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 - 5 of 5
-
Publication
Taking Control: How Financial Inclusion Impacts Labor Supply
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-13)Social and familial financial transfers are common in low-income communities and have positive social effects. To address this challenge, the authors designed and implemented a financial innovation to lower redistributive pressure among female cashew-processing workers: a blocked savings account into which gains in workers’ earnings get transferred. Take-up of the private account was substantially higher at 60 percent, compared to 14 percent for the non-private account. Being offered a private account increased workers’ attendance by 9.7 percent and earnings by 11.4 percent. The estimates imply that workers face a 9-23 percent social tax rate, and that the welfare benefits of informal redistribution may come at the cost of depressing labor supply and productivity. -
Publication
Two Heads are Better Than One: Agricultural Production and Investment in Côte d’Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05)Increasing agricultural productivity and investment is critical to reducing poverty, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture remains the dominant income-generating activity. One potential way to promote investment and improve the efficiency of household farm production is to empower women as co-managers and facilitate the coordination of production decisions within the family. The authors test this approach in Côte d’Ivoire through a couples training delivered to rubber producers, and find that including women in economic planning improved the efficiency of household farm production and promoted higher levels of investment. -
Publication
The Africa Gender Innovation Lab’s Core Empowerment Indicators: Developing a Cross-Country Module to Complement Context-Specific Measures
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)To advance economic gender equality in Africa, the authors first need to know which development programs work to economically empower women. Better data on gender-informed development indicators is imperative for tracking the progress in promoting gender equality, designing interventions to address gender-based constraints and rigorously evaluating their impact. Measurement of women’s economic empowerment requires a clear conceptualization of what empowerment is and is not. One guiding definition that the authors use at the Africa gender innovation lab (GIL) is economic empowerment as the ability and power to generate income and accumulate assets, and to control their disposition. Beyond being clear on what is being measured, how it is measured also matters - and selecting the best tools for the task is no easy feat. In impact evaluations, tailoring measurement to reflect local economic arrangements and capture the specific pathway the project is intending to affect can yield a more precise (and useful) picture of women’s economic empowerment. On the other hand, systematically tracking the same indicators across projects can provide a broader understanding of the relationship between intermediate and final empowerment outcomes, as well as between different empowerment domains, such as assets, mobility, time, attitudes, and aspirations. Moreover, practitioners and policymakers have emphasized the need for a concise set of practical metrics that can be easily shared and used. -
Publication
What’s Mine is Yours: Pilot Evidence from a Randomized Impact Evaluation on Property Rights and Women’s Empowerment in Cote d’Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)The protection of formal institutions can help to strengthen women’s property rights, potentially improving welfare and economic efficiency of the household with broader implications. Individual land certification in women’s names and civil marriage registration offer two routes for women towards a more formal delineation of their property rights. In the context of the World Bank Land Policy Improvement and Implementation Project (PAMOFOR), this pilot project examines what drives the take-up of innovative interventions that aim to strengthen women’s property rights in rural Cote d’Ivoire: providing economic incentives for a man to register land in his wife’s name, shifting attitudes through an emotionally resonant video, and encouraging civil marriage in the wake of a new legal reform. Pilot results show how highlighting the benefits of women’s land ownership for family harmony, economic efficiency, and security for the family can induce husbands to reallocate land to their wives. -
Publication
Reducing the Agricultural Gender Gap in Cote d'Ivoire: How has it Changed?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-02)Over the last decade, Cote d’Ivoire has witnessed a remarkable shrinking of its gender gap in agricultural productivity. When comparing similar households, the gender gap has been reduced by 32 percent.