Africa Gender Innovation Lab

82 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

http://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.

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 48

Policy Solutions to Close Gender Gaps in the Agriculture Sector in Nigeria

(Washington, DC, 2022-07) World Bank

Substantial gender gaps exist in labor force participation and productivity in the agriculture sector in Nigeria. Closing the gender productivity gap in agriculture could lead to sizable gains in the Nigerian economy, boosting gross domestic product. Key factors driving the gender gaps in agriculture include women farmers’ limited use of farm inputs, choice of lowvalue crops, and lower productivity of hired labor. To successfully close gender gaps, policy makers not only need a detailed account of what drives these gaps, but also a rigorous evidence base on cost-effective policy options. This brief offers guidance on interventions that could be adopted to address the underlying constraints faced by women farmers in Nigeria. These recommendations could also meaningfully inform the framework and implementation of the National Gender Policy on Agriculture.
Addressing Gender-Based Occupational Segregation: Experimental Evidence from the Republic of Congo

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-01) Gassier, Marine ; Pierotti, Rachael Susan ; Rouanet, Lea Marie ; Traore, Lacina ; Rouanet, Léa

Gender-based occupational segregation - the fact that men and women are typically concentrated in different occupations and economic sectors - contributes to gender gaps in earnings. In an experiment in the Republic of Congo, the authors examine whether addressing informational constraints around returns from male dominated sectors can encourage young women to apply for training in more profitable male-dominated sectors. There is high potential for interventions that pair information on returns and trade exposure. However, there are gender gaps in access to early opportunities, mainly relevant technical experience and network connections. Providing information on earnings is a low-cost intervention that can encourage young women to crossover to more lucrative trades, thereby reducing the gender gap in earnings.
Tell Us How We are Doing: Motivating Teams Through Feedback Versus Public Recognition

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10) Delavallade, Clara

Motivating service providers to improve the quality of public service delivery is a major development challenge across the globe. This is particularly relevant for women, who are over-represented as providers of essential public services such as healthcare and education in Africa. In the context of a national school nutrition program in the Western Cape province of South Africa, the authors offered either private feedback or public recognition to female school-feeding teams to examine the effectiveness of different incentives schemes when financial rewards are not available. Receiving private feedback on performance boosted workers’ effort more than public recognition. These results suggest that providing performance feedback can be an effective policy for motivating female teams and improving service delivery, more so than mechanisms leveraging public image.
New Insights on Women’s Employment in Ethiopia’s Industrial Parks

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-10-01) Ajayi, Kehinde Funmilola ; Buehren, Niklas ; Cassidy, Rachel Margaret ; Salcher, Isabelle

Low take-up of job offers and high early turnover continue to affect employment of Ethiopia’s female factory workers. Despite starting factory work around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the women in our sample still left factory employment primarily for voluntary reasons unrelated to COVID-19. This is consistent with early separation being a longer-term feature of factory employment. Women who voluntarily left their factory jobs reported they had received wages close to the minimum of what they were expecting. Much of the COVID-related separations we observe are “voluntary”, with women choosing to leave factory jobs and mainly staying at home due to personal health concerns. Therefore, while measures to reinforce input chains and demand for factory orders remain key, immediate interventions to address workers’ health and safety concerns are crucial to counter voluntary quitting in times of a public health crisis.
Coping with COVID-19 Shocks in Western Uganda

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09) Sharma, Ambika ; Gruver, Ariel ; Montalvao, Joao ; O'Sullivan, Michael

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.
Unlocking the Potential of Women Entrepreneurs in Uganda: A Brief of Policy Interventions

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08-26) Copley, Amy ; Gokalp, Birce ; Kirkwood, Daniel

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.
Monitoring COVID-19 Impacts on Firms in Ethiopia: Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Women-Owned Firms Differently

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Abebe, Girum ; Bundervoet, Tom ; Wieser, Christina

As COVID-19 continues to disrupt the Ethiopian economy, a major concern is that the pre-existing gendered challenges facing women entrepreneurs, in access to capital and hired labor, for example, will worsen, further undermining the survival and performance of women-owned firms. However, very little data exist to monitor the gender differences in impacts brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, in April 2020, the World Bank launched a high-frequency phone survey (HFPS-F) of a random sample of firms in Addis Ababa to collect detailed information on firm operations, hiring and firing, and expectations of future operations and labor demand. The analysis that follows draws on the three rounds of the HFPS-F survey implemented between April 15 and June 18, 2020, consisting of a balanced panel of 454 firms from Addis Ababa.
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) Donald, Aletheia ; Goldstein, Markus

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.
COVID-19 Impacts on Women Factory Workers in Ethiopia: Results from High-Frequency Phone Surveys

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Ajayi, Kehinde ; Buehren, Niklas ; Ebrahim, Menaal ; Hailemicheal, Adiam

As the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to disrupt international supply chains and local economies, workers employed in export-oriented industries are likely to experience both demand and supply shocks due to the crisis. In Ethiopia, a slowed global economy can pose a significant threat to the country’s industrial parks and their factories in the female-concentrated garment industry, forcing them to lay off workers or even shut down their operations. To monitor the potential effects of the pandemic and support the design of evidence-based policy responses, the gender innovation policy initiative for Ethiopia (GIPIE) is conducting a high-frequency phone survey on a sample of 323 recently hired female factory workers in Ethiopia. This brief reports on the first two waves of data collected between late March and late May 2020, showing the evolution of this sample of female workers’ employment status, earnings, and expectations over the course of the pandemic. Due to the size of the sample and the fact that it only includes recent hires at the Bole Lemi Industrial Park, the results may not generalize for the full population of women factory workers in industrial parks. Data collection from the ongoing high-frequency phone survey of women factory workers in Bole Lemi Industrial Park will continue in the coming months, with recurring surveys every month for a total of 6 rounds. By tracking the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, these data collection efforts aim to equip policymakers with timely, actionable data to better design and implement policy responses in support of Ethiopia’s women factory workers.
COVID-19 Pandemic Through a Gender Lens

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Copley, Amy ; Decker, Alison ; Delavelle, Fannie ; Goldstein, Markus ; O'Sullivan, Michael ; Papineni, Sreelakshmi

The coronavirus (COVID-19) (coronavirus) pandemic has led to disruptions of both social and economic activities across the globe. While the early narrative described COVID-19 (coronavirus) as the "great equalizer," asserting that the virus is capable of infecting anyone, it is critical for policymakers to understand that the impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus) will not be the same for everyone. Experience from previous epidemics suggest that COVID-19 (coronavirus) will impact groups who are most vulnerable and amplify any existing inequalities across countries, communities, households and individuals. This note focuses on the existing gender inequalities in the economic sphere in Sub-Saharan Africa and summarizes how the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic could affect women and girls disproportionately. It draws on impact evaluation research to showcase policy options to help build women's economic resilience and minimize any potential negative impacts during the pandemic and recovery.