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
    Supporting Women Throughout the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Emergency Response and Economic Recovery
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04) World Bank
    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) World Bank
    This policy brief summarizes key policy lessons from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab on ways to empower women farmers.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    Are Cash Transfers Better Chunky or Smooth?: Evidence from an Impact Evaluation of a Cash Transfer Program in Northern Nigeria
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017) Bastian, Gautam; Goldstein, Markus; Papineni, Sreelakshmi
    Women receiving unconditional cash transfers in northern Nigeria worked more, particularly, in their own businesses, spent more on consumption, were more food secure, saved more, bought more animals and improved their housing compared to the women in the control group. Quarterly transfers cost half as much as monthly transfers to administer, but there is no difference in outcomes. Women’s ability to control the cash transfers is the same under a quarterly payment scheme and monthly payment scheme. Women use cash transfers to increase investment in their own business activities. Cash transfer recipients were not only more likely to be involved in their own non-farm business but they also spent more on business inputs and increased their business profits. Their husbands remained active farmers and didn’t change their business activities. The lab aims to do this by producing and delivering a new body of evidence and developing a compelling narrative, geared towards policymakers, on what works and what does not work in promoting gender equality.
  • Publication
    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.
  • Publication
    Costing the Gender Gap
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-12) 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.
  • Publication
    Explaining Gender Differentials in Agricultural Production in Nigeria
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-10) Oseni, Gbemisola; Corral, Paul; Goldstein, Markus; Winters, Paul
    Nigeria presents a unique case study on differences in agricultural productivity between men and women. This study, which captures a comprehensive picture of agriculture across the nation, shows that female farmers produce 16 percent less per hectare than their male counterparts, when plot size, farmer characteristics, and inputs are taken into account. This gender gap is driven by the North East and Central zones located in the Northern region of the country, where female farmers are 28 percent less productive than male farmers. In this region, women, particularly those who are older, farm on smaller plots and have lower levels of key inputs, notably fertilizer and labor, which is a well-documented pattern in many African contexts. The Southern region, however, does not fit this established pattern. When controlling for key characteristics and factors of production, in the South no gender gap in productivity is observed, though female farmers will benefit from additional herbicide and female labor. The notably different patterns in these two regions of the same country provide ample space for further study. Thus, in order to decrease the country-wide gender gap in production, the authors recommend extending access to fertilizer, hired labor, and cash crops to women - particularly those in the North.