Africa Gender Innovation Lab
80 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 - 7 of 7
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Publication
Coping with COVID-19 Shocks in Western Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09)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. -
Publication
Unlocking the Potential of Women Entrepreneurs in Uganda: A Brief of Policy Interventions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08-26)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. -
Publication
Top Policy Lessons in Agriculture
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03)This policy brief summarizes key policy lessons from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab on ways to empower women farmers. -
Publication
As Good as the Company They Keep?: Improving Farmers’ Social Networks
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03)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. -
Publication
Costing the Gender Gap
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12)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. -
Publication
Breaking the Metal Ceiling: Female Entrepreneurs Who Succeed in Male-Dominated Sectors in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01)Worldwide, female entrepreneurs tend to experience lower productivity and profit than their male peers. One reason for this is that women tend to be concentrated in less profitable businesses. This mixed methods study from Uganda investigates a range of factors that may hinder or help female entrepreneurs move into male-dominated sectors, where they are as successful as men, and significantly more successful than women who remain in traditionally female sectors. This analysis finds that information gaps about the relative profitability of male-dominated businesses play an important role, as do the types of role models influencing youth as they determine their career paths. Informational campaigns, as well as apprenticeship and mentorship programs, present potential policy options. -
Publication
Empowering Adolescent Girls in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01)The productive potential of adolescent girls in Uganda is critically limited by the reciprocal relationship between low health, education and employment indicators. With little incentive to attain relevant skills training, girls choose to have children early and become engaged in risky behavior, further hampering their ability to generate income. To address these challenges, we evaluated the impact of a BRAC program that simultaneously provided livelihoods training to run small-scale enterprises, and education on health and risky behaviors. After tracking 4,888 girls over a period of two years, the author found that the program had strong positive impacts on economic, health and agency outcomes for the girls. The program increased the likelihood of participants engaging in income-generating activities by 32 percent; self-reported routine condom use by those who were sexually active increased by 50 percent; fertility rates dropped by 26 percent; and there was a 76 percent reduction in adolescent girls reporting having had sex against their will during the past year.