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 - 10 of 12
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Publication
Locking Crops to Unlock Investment: Experimental Evidence on Warrantage in Burkina Faso
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-09-30)Smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa face an array of challenges to realizing higher profits from their agricultural activities, including lack of adequate storage facilities and credit market imperfections. To address these constraints, warrantage, an innovative inventory credit system, offers farmers the opportunity to both store their crop production and access credit simultaneously. In a study in Burkina Faso, a research team worked with 38 villages to look at the impacts of warrantage on a variety of household and agricultural outcomes when given access to storage warehouses in close proximity villages. With additional cash on hand from increased revenues, households with access to the warrantage scheme invested more in education, increased their livestock holdings, and invested more in agricultural inputs for the following year. No impacts were found on food expenditures or on food security indicators. These findings suggest that warrantage systems, when established through trusted community institutions, can positively influence household incomes and farmers’ investment behavior. -
Publication
Top Policy Lessons in Agriculture
(Washington, DC, 2022-09)Across Africa, agriculture is a primary sector of employment, and African women provide about 40 percent of the agricultural labor across the continent. Yet women farmers face systemic barriers to success, leading to large gender gaps in agricultural productivity that range from 23 percent in Tanzania to 66 percent in Niger. These gender gaps not only represent major untapped economic potential but could also yield sizable gains for African economies if they were closed. For instance, in Nigeria, closing the gender productivity gap in agriculture could boost gross domestic product by an estimated US2.3 billion dollars and potentially as much as US8.1 billion dollars due to spillovers to other economic sectors. Several factors driving female farmers’ lower productivity are the time and bandwidth taxes from care and household responsibilities, limited access to and control of hired labor and other productive inputs, skills and information gaps, low financial liquidity, and restrictive social norms. Over 90 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s extreme poor, who are some of the most vulnerable to shocks, are engaged in agriculture. In the face of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global price shocks, that can exacerbate food insecurity, women farmers need targeted support and access to productive inputs that can secure their livelihoods and mitigate existing gender inequalities. Impact evaluation evidence from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab points toward policy solutions that can address many of these constraints and help women farmers reach their full potential. -
Publication
Policy Solutions to Close Gender Gaps in the Agriculture Sector in Nigeria
(Washington, DC, 2022-07)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. -
Publication
Supporting Women Throughout the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Emergency Response and Economic Recovery
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04)This brief highlight evidence from the Africa gender innovation lab and other promising research on mechanisms that can help protect the lives and livelihoods of women and girls - at the household level, in firms and farms, and during adolescence - in the context of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic. -
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
Top Policy Lessons in Women's Property Rights
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03)This policy brief summarizes top policy lessons from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab's work in securing property rights for women. -
Publication
GIL Top Policy Lessons on Empowering Adolescent Girls
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)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. -
Publication
GIL Top Policy Lessons on Empowering Women Entrepreneurs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)Women make up more than half of the total number of entrepreneurs in Africa. Yet, on average, for every dollar of profits men entrepreneurs earn, women entrepreneurs earn 66 cents. Supporting women to grow their firms would translate into higher economic growth for Sub-Saharan Africa. -
Publication
GIL Top Policy Lessons on Increasing Women’s Youth Employment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)Young women in Africa are less likely to be employed than young men, as a result of gaps in access to resources such as skills, time, and capital, and due to underlying social norms. Adolescence is a particularly critical time to intervene, as teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school can have severe impacts on future employment and earnings with significant consequences on their lives. At the macroeconomic level, investing in adolescent girls is also crucial for Sub-Saharan Africa`s demographic dividend. -
Publication
Top Policy Lessons from Africa Gender Innovation Lab Research
(Washington, DC, 2017-10)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.