Africa Gender Innovation Lab
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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.
18 results
Items in this collection
Publication Top Policy Lessons in Agriculture(Washington, DC, 2022-09) World BankAcross 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 Two Heads are Better Than One: Agricultural Production and Investment in Côte d’Ivoire(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Donald, Aletheia; Goldstein, Markus; Rouanet, Léa; Rouanet, LéaIncreasing agricultural productivity and investment is critical to reducing poverty, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture remains the dominant income-generating activity. One potential way to promote investment and improve the efficiency of household farm production is to empower women as co-managers and facilitate the coordination of production decisions within the family. The authors test this approach in Côte d’Ivoire through a couples training delivered to rubber producers, and find that including women in economic planning improved the efficiency of household farm production and promoted higher levels of investment.Publication Top Policy Lessons in Agriculture(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) World BankThis policy brief summarizes key policy lessons from the Africa Gender Innovation Lab on ways to empower women farmers.Publication Reducing the Agricultural Gender Gap in Cote d'Ivoire: How has it Changed?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-02) Donald, Aletheia; Lawin, Gabriel; Rouanet, Lea; Rouanet, LéaOver the last decade, Cote d’Ivoire has witnessed a remarkable shrinking of its gender gap in agricultural productivity. When comparing similar households, the gender gap has been reduced by 32 percent.Publication Can Public Works Enhance Welfare in Fragile Economies? The Londo Program in the Central African Republic(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01) Alik-Lagrange, Arthur; Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Hoogeveen, JohannesWe evaluated the Londo public works program, which provided temporary employment and a bicycle to beneficiaries selected through public lotteries in the Central African Republic. The evaluation focused on the impacts of the program on households' welfare between 2 and 21 months after participation. We find that the program enhances the productivity of participants in a lasting way, with an approximate 10 percent increase in monthly earnings and a small impact on the number of days worked, well after they finished participating in the program. This improvement takes place through different channels for men, who intensify agricultural production and diversify in small manufacture activities, and women, who diversify into small trade activities. Londo increases the beneficiary households’ durable goods, such as furniture and cellphones, and productive assets, such as agricultural tools and livestock – thereby building household wealth. It also significantly improved their ability to cope with shocks. However, women coming from the poorest households experience much lower impacts on productivity and assets than men and women from less poor households, which indicates the need for specific provisions for widows and ultra-poor women in this type of intervention. The provision of bicycles increases mobility for male beneficiaries, but not for women, likely due to gender norms, risks and bike-riding skills, and other related constraints affecting women specifically.Publication What Are the Economic Costs of Gender Gaps in Ethiopia?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-03) Buehren, Niklas; Gonzalez, Paula; Copley, AmyDespite Ethiopia’s remarkable economic progress over the past decade, gender gaps in key economic activities - agriculture, entrepreneurship, and wage employment - indicate that challenges remain to realizing the full potential of women’s economic empowerment. Differences in simple averages between men and women show that women lag men by 36 percent in agricultural productivity, by 79 percent in business sales, and by 44 percent in hourly wages. This brief examines the costs of these gender gaps and estimates the potential gains from closing them.Publication Africa Gender Innovation Lab Ethiopia Gender Diagnostic: Building the Evidence Base to Address Gender Inequality in Ethiopia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019) Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Gonzalez, Paula; Hagos, Adiam; Kirkwood, Daniel; Paskov, Patricia; Poulin, Michelle; Raja, ChandniEthiopia has made remarkable economic progress over the past decade, achieving high gross domestic product (GDP) growth and dramatically reducing poverty. Despite this success, current gender gaps show that challenges remain to realizing inclusive growth and the full potential of women’s economic empowerment. In Ethiopia, women still lag men on several important economic indicators, including employment rate, agricultural productivity, earnings from self-employment, and wage income. While the Government of Ethiopia has already made significant commitments and investments aiming to close the country’s gender gaps, new data offer an opportunity to generate critical evidence to strategically target these investments. For this reason, the Africa gender innovation lab’s (GIL) Ethiopia gender diagnostic report provides innovative analysis on the root causes and drivers of gender inequality in Ethiopia. Using data from the latest round of the Ethiopia socioeconomic survey (2015-2016) and an established statistical approach, the report examines the country’s gender gaps in employment, agricultural productivity, and income from self- and wage employment. It presents specific policy areas for the government to target in addressing the constraints faced by female workers, farmers, and business owners. The key findings and policy recommendations are discussed in the report.Publication Investing in Childcare for Women's Economic Empowerment(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08) Donald, Aletheia; Campos, Francisco; Vaillant, Julia; Cucagna, Maria EmiliaTwo thirds of sub-Saharan Africa’s citizens depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Women make up a large part of the agricultural workforce: in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), over 80 percent of women work in farming compared to 60 percent of men. However, women face a variety of constraints which limit the time they can devote to working or supervising farm labor and reduce the productivity of their plots. Increasing women’s agricultural productivity has the potential not only to improve their own economic status, but also to enhance economic growth and food security in their communities. The Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) used a combination of consultations in the field, desk research, and primary data collection to understand the patterns of time allocation in rural households in Western DRC, and to assess the factors to consider when designing effective interventions aimed at increasing women’s agricultural productivity.Publication The Impact of Strengthening Agricultural Extension Services: Evidence from Ethiopia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04) Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Molina, Ezequiel; Vaillant, JuliaExtension 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 BankThe 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.