Africa Gender Policy Briefs
75 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 17
-
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
Monitoring COVID-19 Impacts on Firms in Ethiopia: Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Women-Owned Firms Differently
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09)As COVID-19 continues to disrupt the Ethiopian economy, a major concern is that the pre-existing gendered challenges facing women entrepreneurs, in access to capital and hired labor, for example, will worsen, further undermining the survival and performance of women-owned firms. However, very little data exist to monitor the gender differences in impacts brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, in April 2020, the World Bank launched a high-frequency phone survey (HFPS-F) of a random sample of firms in Addis Ababa to collect detailed information on firm operations, hiring and firing, and expectations of future operations and labor demand. The analysis that follows draws on the three rounds of the HFPS-F survey implemented between April 15 and June 18, 2020, consisting of a balanced panel of 454 firms from Addis Ababa. -
Publication
Re-Thinking Firm Level Data Collection during COVID-19: Using Mobile Sensing to Understand the Financial Behaviors of Entrepreneurs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)SMEs around the world are entering a crisis period in light of COVID-19, adding new urgency to understanding firm-level financial behaviors and challenges. At the same time, traditional methods of in-person data collection pose a health risk to both enumerator and firm and contravene social distancing guidelines and public health policies. Remote data collection methods such as phone sensing offer a viable and promising alternative. Phone sensing utilizes data generated from mobile phone usage, from GPS location to call logs to battery life – to offer insights on firm behavior, trends, and challenges. While the technology is still new and untested, this note explores some of the early insights gained from a pilot of mobile sensing technology to understand the financial behavior of women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia. Phone sensing data allows us to glean some insights into the lives and behaviors of entrepreneurs which traditional data collection might not reveal. One of the key finding of this pilot is that mobile phone sensing data correlates with business outcomes. Insights such as the ones from this pilot, if collected at a larger and more systematic scale, could enhance our understanding of borrower behavior, and could help lenders and policymakers better target potential borrowers, better understand when borrowers are likely to face adversity, and better design products to meet their needs. -
Publication
The Impacts of COVID-19 on Women-Owned Enterprises in Ethiopia: Findings from a High-Frequency Phone Survey
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07)This brief summarizes findings from a high-frequency survey of women-owned firms in Ethiopia which participate in the International Development Association (IDA) - financed Women Entrepreneurship Development Project (WEDP). Over the past five years, WEDP reached nearly 40,000 women-owned firms in Ethiopia with meso-loans and business training. Many WEDP firms had been on a high-growth trajectory, with firms that benefited from WEDP services growing incomes by 67 percent and employment by 55 percent over a three-year period prior to the crisis. This brief is based on the results from the first round of the survey, implemented between May 15, 2020 and June 15, 2020, revealing some initial insights into the scale of the impacts and the nature of the challenges currently facing the WEDP firms. -
Publication
Competing Priorities: How Household Income Management Affects Women’s Microenterprises in Urban Ghana
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01-08)Cash grants often lead to increases in business profits for male entrepreneurs, but not for female entrepreneurs. This study identifies key household-level factors that constrain women’s ability to grow their business. Through in-depth qualitative research, it provides evidence that intrahousehold relationships influence the business decisions of female microentrepreneurs in urban Ghana. Intrahousehold relationships constrain the decisions women make about their businesses in three primary ways: 1) women hide income and sometimes limit investment in an effort to reinforce their husband’s responsibilities as a primary provider and secure sufficient support, 2) women prioritize savings to meet daily household needs, cover shortfalls in their husband’s financial support, and take care of emergencies, and 3) marital insecurity encourages women to dedicate business income to long-term investments independent of their husbands, such as property or children’s’ education. Efforts to support women microentrepreneurs will need to address barriers to women’s ability to meet daily household needs and to plan for long-term security, in addition to relieving capital constraints. Policy responses could include increasing security by improving marital property rights for women or improving social safety nets to change the calculus that leads women to prioritize savings over investment. -
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
Are Mobile Savings the Silver Bullet to Help Women Grow Their Businesses?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-09)In Tanzania and Indonesia, we promoted the expansion of mobile savings accounts among women micro-entrepreneurs and provided them with business related training. In doing so, we simultaneously relaxed supply- and demand side constraints to savings that women might face. In both countries, the training enhanced the impact of promoting mobile savings. In Indonesia it led women to save more overall, including a nascent use of mobile accounts, and report greater decision making power within the household. In Tanzania, it led to substantially higher mobile savings, new businesses and products, more capital investment, labor effort, and better business practices. However, these short-term impacts have yet to translate into higher business profits. In Indonesia, we observe increased household welfare, but no discernible effects on business outcomes shortly after the training ended. In Tanzania, the increased business investments were not accompanied by greater profitability. -
Publication
Designing Targeted Business Trainings for Impact: Insights from a Women Entrepreneurs' Program in Tanzania
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-07)Business training in low-income countries have scarcely shown impacts on revenues and profits, especially for female entrepreneurs. In this study, we test two kinds of trainings, one basic in-class training and one enhanced version supplemented with individualized coaching, to test their respective impact on women with established small businesses in Tanzania. We found that targeting the right entrepreneurs can improve the effectiveness of a tailored training and even lead to improvements in performance. We also determined that the content and delivery method of business support provided to the female entrepreneurs impact their adoption of business practices. -
Publication
Personal Initiative Training Leads to Remarkable Growth of Women-Owned Small Businesses in Togo
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01)Standard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries, by teaching accounting, marketing and other basic business skills. However, research shows limited impacts of this traditional business training approach. Through an experiment in Togo, we introduced the personal initiative training program, a new and effective psychology-based entrepreneurship training that outperforms traditional business training. The personal initiative training increased firm profits in Togo by 30 percent relative to a control group, compared to no significant impacts from a traditional business training. Personal initiative training led to more than just a boost in profits for micro entrepreneurs. After the training business owners were more innovative, introduced new products, borrowed more and made larger investments. The personal initiative training was particularly effective for female entrepreneurs, for whom traditional training has often been in effective. Women who received personal initiative training saw their profits increase by 40 percent, compared to 5 percent for traditional business. This study’s findings make a strong case for the role of psychology in better influencing how small business training programs are taught in West Africa and beyond. It shows the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset in addition to learning the business practices of successful entrepreneurs. Based on these promising results, the personal initiative training is being implemented in programs in Mozambique, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Mexico. -
Publication
Algorithms for Inclusion: Data Driven Lending for Women Owned SMEs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06)All over the world, women have less access to credit than men. Because of both discriminatory property laws and unwritten social customs, women are less likely than men to own high-value assets that can be used as collateral to secure loans. Financial institutions in developing countries rely on heavy collateral requirements because they don’t have enough information about their borrowers. New technologies - many emerging from financial technology (fintech) startups in the Silicon Valley - have the potential to generate data on borrowers that can replace traditional collateral requirements, and unlock finance for women. In Ethiopia, the authors explored introducing fintech that can harness the data that financial institutions are already sitting on. The technology focuses on digitizing hard-copy loan application files of previous borrowers to identify trends and characteristics associated with repayment, and predict creditworthiness of new borrowers. Fintech solutions can viably address the collateral constraint for women borrowers, and can work even in low tech environments. But technology adoption isn’t easy, and assessing the readiness of financial institutions to adopt fintech and embark on technological change is a critical first step.