Africa Gender Innovation Lab
83 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 26
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Publication
Supporting Youth Employment through Cash Grants for Entrepreneurship: Findings from a Qualitative Study of the Perspectives and Experiences of Cash Grant Recipients under the Benin Youth Employment Project
(Washington, DC, 2023-10-25)Benin’s labor market is characterized by a high participation rate, but extensive informality and underemployment. Underemployment is even higher among youth and rural women. The labor market is also extremely segregated by gender. Under the Benin Youth Employment Project(PEJ), closed in June 2019, the Government of Benin (GoB) successfully piloted a gender sensitive economic inclusion program. In addition to a comprehensive package of services, the project included services and operational processes to maximize female participation. The PEJ focused on helping youth start or expand their income-generating activities by delivering business and life skills training and cash grants. The life skills modules focused on communication, problem solving, gender and empowerment, aspirations, and initiative. An impact evaluation of PEJ, conducted by the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), was designed to measure the impact of these components alone and in combination. One group of participants received both interventions, one group only the training, one group only the cash grant, and a control group received neither. The ambition was to evaluate the relative impacts of relaxing the financial capital constraint, the human capital constraint, and both simultaneously. The purpose of the study was to investigate the mechanisms of impact of the cash grants by gathering grant recipients’ perspectives on the support they received. The research questions and methodology are described in this report. -
Publication
Gender and Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa: Review of Constraints and Effective Interventions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-07-13)Raising agricultural is essential to boosting gross domestic product (GDP), reducing poverty, improving food security, and achieving structural transformation across Africa. Yet, Africa’s agricultural intensification has not kept pace with that of other developing regions. One significant and costly inefficiency undermining the region’s progress is the pervasive gender gap in agricultural productivity. This gender gap represents not only a substantial impediment to growth in the agricultural sector but, moreover, a forgone opportunity to increase national income and reduce poverty at the regional level. To address the productivity gender gap and realize the potential of African agriculture, establishing a clear understanding of the gender specific constraints hindering the productivity of women farmers is crucial. This paper develops a conceptual framework for thinking about the gender gap in agricultural productivity, reviews evidence on the effectiveness of policies and interventions designed to address the constraints faced by women farmers and proposes a research agenda to move the policy debate forward. Section II provides an overview of the agricultural gender gap in Sub-Saharan Africa. Section III presents a framework that establishes linkages between the choices that women farmers make, the constraints and contextual factors influencing their decisions, and the agricultural outcomes they achieve. Section IV identifies the constraints that women farmers face, reviews the evidence on the levels of severity and relative impact of these constraints on productivity, and highlights existing approaches and interventions that tackle these constraints. Section V outlines a research agenda to fill knowledge gaps and generate evidence useful to policymakers in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Section VI concludes. -
Publication
Finding the Time and Labor to Farm: How Social Dynamics Drive Gender Differences in Agricultural Labor in Southern Nigeria
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03-28)Across Sub-Saharan Africa smallholder farmers depend heavily on manual labor supplied by their households, families, and communities, but women are particularly labor constrained. This research paired a detailed quantitative examination of patterns of gender difference in the allocation of time and agricultural labor with an in-depth qualitative examination of how people explain those patterns. The descriptive findings and resulting conceptual framework can be used to guide future programming and research. In southwestern Nigeria, married women’s time and agricultural labor constraints are rooted in common social expectations that men’s farm plots take priority and that a woman’s own farming should not interfere with the agricultural production managed by her husband. Women access lower quantity and quality of labor because of off-farm commitments, and time constraints around when in the day and when in the season labor is allocated to their farm plots. Overcoming agricultural labor constraints for women farmers, especially married women, may require reimagining the role of women and men’s farms in the household. Several new Africa gender innovation lab studies suggest avenues for future innovations to support women producers. -
Publication
Policy Solutions to Close Gender Gaps in the Agriculture Sector in Nigeria
(Washington, DC, 2022-07)Substantial gender gaps exist in labor force participation and productivity in the agriculture sector in Nigeria. Closing the gender productivity gap in agriculture could lead to sizable gains in the Nigerian economy, boosting gross domestic product. Key factors driving the gender gaps in agriculture include women farmers’ limited use of farm inputs, choice of lowvalue crops, and lower productivity of hired labor. To successfully close gender gaps, policy makers not only need a detailed account of what drives these gaps, but also a rigorous evidence base on cost-effective policy options. This brief offers guidance on interventions that could be adopted to address the underlying constraints faced by women farmers in Nigeria. These recommendations could also meaningfully inform the framework and implementation of the National Gender Policy on Agriculture. -
Publication
Coping with COVID-19 Shocks in Western Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09)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
Measuring Women’s Sense of Control and Efficacy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08)Increasing women’s sense of control over their lives is key to reducing gender inequalities and improving development outcomes. Research suggests women tend to believe less in their abilities to act effectively towards their goals and they provide more importance than men to external factors determining their life events. Understanding the degree to which women perceive control over their lives is critical for designing and adapting policies to change limiting local norms. Social expectations about women’s unpaid care roles impose severe constraints on women’s well-being and livelihoods and are, thus, integrally linked to women’s agency. Yet, this linkage is not well defined in recent measures of women’s empowerment, which tend to incorporate time use only in terms of time poverty or having an excessive workload. This brief summarizes existing knowledge gaps in the three key measurement areas and lays out how the measures for advancing gender equality (MAGNET) initiative plans to tackle them. -
Publication
Measuring Women’s Goal Setting and Decision-Making
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08)Improving women’s agency is crucial for advancing gender equality. Less than half of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia participate in making decisions over their own health care, major household purchases, and visiting their families. Improving women’s ability to define goals and act on them is an important - and urgent - policy goal. Yet the understanding of how to achieve this goal is hampered by the lack of adequate measurement tools and recognized best practices. Research is needed to broaden and deepen the measurement of women’s goal setting and decision-making, both within and outside the household. This brief summarizes existing knowledge gaps in the two measurement areas and lays out how the measures for advancing gender equality (MAGNET) initiative plans to tackle them. -
Publication
Measuring Women’s Control Over Assets
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08)Gender inequalities in the ownership, control, and use of assets are a widespread and pervasive development challenge. Persistent gender gaps remain in women’s access to land, housing, and financial assets. Expanding women’s control over assets is key not only for improving gender equality, but also for promoting economic development and wellbeing. Researchers and policymakers have made important progress addressing many of the challenges posed by the heterogenous conceptualization of asset ownership across contexts. But knowledge gaps persist regarding the extent of women’s ownership and rights over assets, the nature and implications of gender differences in reporting data on property rights, and the best practices for questionnaire design and data collection protocols. This brief summarizes existing knowledge gaps in the three key measurement areas and lays out how the measures for advancing gender equality (MAGNET) initiative plans to tackle them. The ultimate goal is to generate rigorous empirical evidence to advise on the best tools to measure and analyze women’s control over assets. -
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
COVID-19 Impacts on Women Factory Workers in Ethiopia: Results from High-Frequency Phone Surveys
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)As the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to disrupt international supply chains and local economies, workers employed in export-oriented industries are likely to experience both demand and supply shocks due to the crisis. In Ethiopia, a slowed global economy can pose a significant threat to the country’s industrial parks and their factories in the female-concentrated garment industry, forcing them to lay off workers or even shut down their operations. To monitor the potential effects of the pandemic and support the design of evidence-based policy responses, the gender innovation policy initiative for Ethiopia (GIPIE) is conducting a high-frequency phone survey on a sample of 323 recently hired female factory workers in Ethiopia. This brief reports on the first two waves of data collected between late March and late May 2020, showing the evolution of this sample of female workers’ employment status, earnings, and expectations over the course of the pandemic. Due to the size of the sample and the fact that it only includes recent hires at the Bole Lemi Industrial Park, the results may not generalize for the full population of women factory workers in industrial parks. Data collection from the ongoing high-frequency phone survey of women factory workers in Bole Lemi Industrial Park will continue in the coming months, with recurring surveys every month for a total of 6 rounds. By tracking the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, these data collection efforts aim to equip policymakers with timely, actionable data to better design and implement policy responses in support of Ethiopia’s women factory workers.