Africa Gender Innovation Lab

95 items available

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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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Two Heads are Better Than One: Agricultural Production and Investment in Côte d’Ivoire
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Donald, Aletheia; Goldstein, Markus; Rouanet, Léa; Rouanet, Léa
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.
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.
Can Public Works Enhance Welfare in Fragile Economies? The Londo Program in the Central African Republic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) Alik-Lagrange, Arthur; Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Hoogeveen, Johannes
We evaluated the Londo public works program, which provided temporary employment and a bicycle to beneficiaries selected through public lotteries in the Central African Republic. The evaluation focused on the impacts of the program on households' welfare between 2 and 21 months after participation. We find that the program enhances the productivity of participants in a lasting way, with an approximate 10 percent increase in monthly earnings and a small impact on the number of days worked, well after they finished participating in the program. This improvement takes place through different channels for men, who intensify agricultural production and diversify in small manufacture activities, and women, who diversify into small trade activities. Londo increases the beneficiary households’ durable goods, such as furniture and cellphones, and productive assets, such as agricultural tools and livestock – thereby building household wealth. It also significantly improved their ability to cope with shocks. However, women coming from the poorest households experience much lower impacts on productivity and assets than men and women from less poor households, which indicates the need for specific provisions for widows and ultra-poor women in this type of intervention. The provision of bicycles increases mobility for male beneficiaries, but not for women, likely due to gender norms, risks and bike-riding skills, and other related constraints affecting women specifically.
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.
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.
The Impact of Strengthening Agricultural Extension Services: Evidence from Ethiopia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04) Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Molina, Ezequiel; Vaillant, Julia
Extension services have been implemented on a large scale in developing countries for decades. However, there is little evidence on their impact on the productivity and welfare of farmers. Our study aims to begin to fill this evidence gap with the goal of identifying and encouraging the uptake of best practices for the delivery of extension services by governments.Our findings suggest that strengthening extension services to make them more responsive to the needs of farmers can induce a switch to more commercial, market-oriented agriculture.Female-headed households seem to have benefited equally from the extension services project but it did not contribute to reducing the gender gap in agricultural outcomes as their initial levels of wealth and consumption, as well as labor and capital endowments were lower.Additional research is required to identify extension services designs that contribute to closing the gender gap, by addressing more specifically the challenges faced by women in areas such as labor and capital endowment.
Personal Initiative Training Leads to Remarkable Growth of Women-Owned Small Businesses in Togo
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01) Campos, Francisco; Frese, Michael; Goldstein, Markus; Iacovone, Leonardo; Johnson, Hillary; McKenzie, David; Mensmann, Mona
Standard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries, by teaching accounting, marketing and other basic business skills. However, research shows limited impacts of this traditional business training approach. Through an experiment in Togo, we introduced the personal initiative training program, a new and effective psychology-based entrepreneurship training that outperforms traditional business training. The personal initiative training increased firm profits in Togo by 30 percent relative to a control group, compared to no significant impacts from a traditional business training. Personal initiative training led to more than just a boost in profits for micro entrepreneurs. After the training business owners were more innovative, introduced new products, borrowed more and made larger investments. The personal initiative training was particularly effective for female entrepreneurs, for whom traditional training has often been in effective. Women who received personal initiative training saw their profits increase by 40 percent, compared to 5 percent for traditional business. This study’s findings make a strong case for the role of psychology in better influencing how small business training programs are taught in West Africa and beyond. It shows the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset in addition to learning the business practices of successful entrepreneurs. Based on these promising results, the personal initiative training is being implemented in programs in Mozambique, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Mexico.
Soft Skills for Hard Constraints: Evidence from High-Achieving Female Farmers
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-07) Montalvao, Joao; Frese, Michael; Goldstein, Markus; Kilic, Talip
Most women farmers in developing countries engage in subsistence agriculture. Previous research highlights a variety of barriers hindering women’s ability to participate in the production and marketing of cash crops, which though riskier can be much more profitable. A study by the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab, the Living Standards Measurement Study and Methods Team, and the National University of Singapore Business School, provides evidence that noncognitive entrepreneurial skills, such as the will to persevere, optimism, and passion for work play a decisive role – even more so in communities where women face greater constraints to their economic empowerment. Overall, the authors findings complement the growing literature in psychology and economics documenting the importance of noncognitive skills in determining important economic outcomes. For more information visit us at: http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/africa-gender-innovation-lab.
Securing Property Rights for Women and Men in Rural Benin
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02) Houngbedji, Kenneth; Goldstein, Markus; Kondylis, Florence; O'Sullivan, Michael; Selod, Harris
Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are less likely than men to own land. They also use less land and have lower tenure security over the land that they use. This gap is costly in terms of lost productive output. The early results showed that improved tenure security through land demarcation increased long-term investments in cash crops and trees and erased the gender gap in land fallowing - a key soil fertility investment. It is important that interventions cover as much of a household’s landholdings as possible: the authors found that some women shifted their agricultural production to plots of land that did not benefit from demarcation so that they can guard these less secure and less productive plots. The rural land use plans (plans fonciers ruraux (PFR)) in Benin represent a more decentralized, low-cost approach to land rights formalization. The PFR program is innovative in its focus on the formalization of existing customary rights of individual landholders. The objectives of the program are to improve tenure security and stimulate agricultural investment in rural areas. The World Bank’s Africa gender innovation lab, in collaboration with researchers from the development research group and the Paris school of economics, set out to evaluate the PFR program’s impact through a randomized controlled trial. This study provides the first set of experimental evidence on the causal impact of a large-scale land formalization program.
Costing the Gender Gap
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12) Westman, Moa; Goldstein, Markus; Torkelsson, Asa
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.