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
    Coping with COVID-19 Shocks in Western Uganda
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09) Sharma, Ambika; Gruver, Ariel; Montalvao, Joao; O'Sullivan, Michael
    In Western Uganda, women farmers and their households were facing widespread agricultural and non-agricultural income shocks in September 2020, indicating a protracted crisis. To cope with these shocks, many households liquidated productive agricultural assets. Women who had higher decision-making power within the household before the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, appeared to cope better with post-outbreak shocks by engaging in more income-generating activities and having better food security in the household.
  • Publication
    What’s Mine is Yours: Pilot Evidence from a Randomized Impact Evaluation on Property Rights and Women’s Empowerment in Cote d’Ivoire
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Donald, Aletheia; Goldstein, Markus; Hartman, Alexandra; La Ferrara, Eliana; O'Sullivan, Michael; Stickler, Mercedes
    The protection of formal institutions can help to strengthen women’s property rights, potentially improving welfare and economic efficiency of the household with broader implications. Individual land certification in women’s names and civil marriage registration offer two routes for women towards a more formal delineation of their property rights. In the context of the World Bank Land Policy Improvement and Implementation Project (PAMOFOR), this pilot project examines what drives the take-up of innovative interventions that aim to strengthen women’s property rights in rural Cote d’Ivoire: providing economic incentives for a man to register land in his wife’s name, shifting attitudes through an emotionally resonant video, and encouraging civil marriage in the wake of a new legal reform. Pilot results show how highlighting the benefits of women’s land ownership for family harmony, economic efficiency, and security for the family can induce husbands to reallocate land to their wives.
  • Publication
    COVID-19 Pandemic Through a Gender Lens
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06) Copley, Amy; Decker, Alison; Delavelle, Fannie; Goldstein, Markus; O'Sullivan, Michael; Papineni, Sreelakshmi
    The coronavirus (COVID-19) (coronavirus) pandemic has led to disruptions of both social and economic activities across the globe. While the early narrative described COVID-19 (coronavirus) as the "great equalizer," asserting that the virus is capable of infecting anyone, it is critical for policymakers to understand that the impacts of COVID-19 (coronavirus) will not be the same for everyone. Experience from previous epidemics suggest that COVID-19 (coronavirus) will impact groups who are most vulnerable and amplify any existing inequalities across countries, communities, households and individuals. This note focuses on the existing gender inequalities in the economic sphere in Sub-Saharan Africa and summarizes how the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic could affect women and girls disproportionately. It draws on impact evaluation research to showcase policy options to help build women's economic resilience and minimize any potential negative impacts during the pandemic and recovery.
  • Publication
    Securing Property Rights for Women and Men in Rural Benin
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02) Houngbedji, Kenneth; Goldstein, Markus; Kondylis, Florence; O'Sullivan, Michael; Selod, Harris
    Women in Sub-Saharan Africa are less likely than men to own land. They also use less land and have lower tenure security over the land that they use. This gap is costly in terms of lost productive output. The early results showed that improved tenure security through land demarcation increased long-term investments in cash crops and trees and erased the gender gap in land fallowing - a key soil fertility investment. It is important that interventions cover as much of a household’s landholdings as possible: the authors found that some women shifted their agricultural production to plots of land that did not benefit from demarcation so that they can guard these less secure and less productive plots. The rural land use plans (plans fonciers ruraux (PFR)) in Benin represent a more decentralized, low-cost approach to land rights formalization. The PFR program is innovative in its focus on the formalization of existing customary rights of individual landholders. The objectives of the program are to improve tenure security and stimulate agricultural investment in rural areas. The World Bank’s Africa gender innovation lab, in collaboration with researchers from the development research group and the Paris school of economics, set out to evaluate the PFR program’s impact through a randomized controlled trial. This study provides the first set of experimental evidence on the causal impact of a large-scale land formalization program.