Africa Gender Innovation Lab

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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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  • Publication
    Designing and Implementing Low-Cost Childcare Solutions: Lessons from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-30) Cassidy, Rachel; Zighed, Roxane; Gokalp, Cansu Birce
    This case study presents lessons learned by the Africa GenderInnovation Lab (GIL) and its partners from pilots of different models of low-cost childcare provision across four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa: mobile crèches in Burkina Faso and Cameroon, fixed-location crèches in Ethiopia, and community-based childcare centers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We also share findings from qualitative research conducted to inform the design of a new community-based childcare pilot in Cameroon. This case study does not intend to prescribe best practices, but instead to provide examples of the key questions, challenges and solutions encountered by project teams.
  • Publication
    Supporting Youth Employment through Cash Grants for Entrepreneurship: Findings from a Qualitative Study of the Perspectives and Experiences of Cash Grant Recipients under the Benin Youth Employment Project
    (Washington, DC, 2023-10-25) World Bank
    Benin’s labor market is characterized by a high participation rate, but extensive informality and underemployment. Underemployment is even higher among youth and rural women. The labor market is also extremely segregated by gender. Under the Benin Youth Employment Project(PEJ), closed in June 2019, the Government of Benin (GoB) successfully piloted a gender sensitive economic inclusion program. In addition to a comprehensive package of services, the project included services and operational processes to maximize female participation. The PEJ focused on helping youth start or expand their income-generating activities by delivering business and life skills training and cash grants. The life skills modules focused on communication, problem solving, gender and empowerment, aspirations, and initiative. An impact evaluation of PEJ, conducted by the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), was designed to measure the impact of these components alone and in combination. One group of participants received both interventions, one group only the training, one group only the cash grant, and a control group received neither. The ambition was to evaluate the relative impacts of relaxing the financial capital constraint, the human capital constraint, and both simultaneously. The purpose of the study was to investigate the mechanisms of impact of the cash grants by gathering grant recipients’ perspectives on the support they received. The research questions and methodology are described in this report.
  • Publication
    The Effects of Childcare on Women and Children: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Burkina Faso
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-08-01) Ajayi, Kehinde F.; Dao, Aziz; Koussoube, Estelle
    In a randomized evaluation conducted in Burkina Faso, the authors examine whether the provision of affordable childcare services improves both early childhood development and women’s economic empowerment. The authors find robust improvement in child development indicators and suggestive evidence that women’s employment, financial outcomes, and psychosocial well-being improved with access to community based childcare centers. Providing affordable, quality childcare services is a cost-effective intervention that yields high social gains. The childcare centers were self-sufficient, essentially paying for themselves. There are also additional unaccounted social benefits from children’s improved development, which can reduce poverty and improve key socio-economic life outcomes. The findings showcase promising new evidence that the provision of childcare can positively impact both women and children. However, there is still more room for change to influence women’s decision-making agency and partners’ involvement in domestic tasks. The findings also demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of the intervention. The childcare centers were not only self-sufficient because they essentially paid for themselves, but also contributed to higher revenue for women who used the childcare centers and the women who were employed as caregivers at the sites.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • 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) 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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    GIL Top Policy Lessons on Empowering Adolescent Girls
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) World Bank
    Adolescent girls face multiple challenges that restrict their horizons, often having to make decisions about employment and their fertility at an early age, and with limited formal education opportunities. With lower levels of education than men, girls are often less equipped for work. Additionally, a plethora of expected domestic responsibilities limit their time for income-generating opportunities. A range of gender innovation lab (GIL) studies across Sub-Saharan Africa have demonstrated the potential of girls’ empowerment programs to change the life trajectories of young women even across a variety of contexts. These programs typically combine community-based girls clubs, life-skills training, vocational training, and sometimes financial literacy and microcredit access, for young women. In addition to implementation in countries such as Uganda and Tanzania, these programs have also helped create a buffer from conflict for young women in South Sudan and during the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone - showing that they are beneficial even across fragile contexts.