Africa Gender Innovation Lab
82 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 23
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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
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
Empowering Women Through Equal Land Rights: Experimental Evidence From Rural Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-04)Traditional customary land tenure systems often limit women’s land rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.In an ongoing experiment in rural Uganda, we offered households fully-subsidized land titles and basic information about the benefits of land titling.Providing additional gender information and making the offer conditional on female co-tilting raised the take up of joint titles to about 76 percent and 89 percent, respectively, without dampening overall demand for titling. -
Publication
Making It Easier for Women in Malawi to Formalize Their Firms and Access Financial Services
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01-28)The rate of informal firms is high in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially for those that are women-owned and in the poorest countries, despite a total of 107 business regulatory reforms recorded by Doing Business across 40 economies in the region. Through an experiment in Malawi, we established an effective and replicable design to offer informal firms support to formalize, costing much less than the typical private sector development intervention. The study shows that one of the primary barriers to registration for women-owned firms is transaction costs. When registration is madevirtually costless, an overwhelming number of women-owned firms (73 percent) choose to register. However, when offered the chance to engage in costless registration for taxes, almost no firms select to pursue this opt ion. Combining business registration with an information session at a bank including the offer of a business bank account leads to an increased use of formal financial services, and results in increases in women owned firms sales and profits of 28 percent and 20 percent respectively. On the other hand, business registration on its own is not as effective in improving access to financial services and does not result in enhanced sales and profits. -
Publication
Working Under Pressure: Improving Labor Productivity through Financial Innovation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-12-17)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)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)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)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)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.