Africa Gender Innovation Lab

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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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Top Policy Lessons in Agriculture
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) World Bank
This policy brief summarizes key policy lessons from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab on ways to empower women farmers.
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.
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.
Top Policy Lessons from Africa Gender Innovation Lab Research
(Washington, DC, 2017-10) World Bank
The study in Togo reveals that psychology-based entrepreneur training (personal initiative training) increases firm profits by 30 percent, compared to a statistically insignificant increase for traditional business training. Personal initiative training was particularly effective for female-owned businesses, who saw their profits increase by 40 percent, compared to no impact from traditional business training. Getting more women into traditionally male-dominated sectors of the economy could boost the incomes of women entrepreneurs and their households. Our study in Ethiopia revealed that firms owned by women who cross over into male-dominated sectors are two times more profitable than firms owned by women who remain in traditionally female sectors, and they are just as profitable as businesses owned by men. Women are more likely to cross-over when parents and husbands support them and when they have access to information on the higher earnings potential in male-dominated sectors.
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.
As Good as the Company They Keep?: Improving Farmers’ Social Networks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03) Leonard, Kenneth; Vasilaky, Kathryn
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.
Intra-Household Dynamics and the Design of Social Protection Programs: The Case of Polygamous Households in North Burkina Faso
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03) Guilbert, Nathalie; Pierotti, Rachael
A recent overview of World Bank social safety net programs and gender highlighted the need for greater consideration of intra-household dynamics in the design of social protection programs (Bardasi 2014). During program design, decisions have to be made about who to target, how much and how often to give cash transfers, and what measures should accompany cash transfers. These decisions become even more complex in the context of polygamous households. The conclusions above are meant to illustrate important links between intra-household dynamics and the design of cash transfer programs. As a preliminary study, this research did not capture the actual effects of cash transfers. It is important to remember that money received from the government in the form of a regular cash transfer may be treated differently than income from other sources. Additional research is planned that will measure differences in the use of cash transfers depending on the social protection program design.
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.
Female Entrepreneurs Who Succeed in Male-Dominated Sectors in Ethiopia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10) Alibhai, Salman; Buehren, Niklas; Papineni, Sreelakshmi
In developing countries, female entrepreneurs have low returns. Yet, the few women who cross over into traditionally male-dominated sectors double their profits. So why don't more women cross over? When parents and husbands support them, women are more likely to cross over. When they lack information on the earnings potential in male-dominated sectors, they are less likely to. This suggests a path to promote women entrepreneurs crossing over. The challenges Ethiopian women face in getting jobs and earning income come from a range of sources. Women start from a more difficult situation than men --without easy access to finance, land, training, education and effective business networks. The share of women in Ethiopia without education is almost twice that of men, which in turn limits women entrepreneurs' ability to grow their businesses. Reducing gender inequalities in education and the labor market could increase annual GDP growth in Ethiopia by around 1.9 percentage points.