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
    Evening the Credit Score: Can Psychometric Credit-Scoring Address Collateral Constraints for Women Entrepreneurs?
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-13) Alibhai, Salman; Cassidy, Rachel; Ebrahim, Menaal; Goldstein, Markus; Edey, Yemsrach Kinfe; Papineni, Sreelakshmi
    Despite gender parity in access to microfinance, and many group-based microfinance schemes favoring women, women face more difficulty than men in getting loans of larger size, longer duration, individual liability, and more flexible terms that may promote firm growth.1 In Ethiopia, as in many contexts where credit information systems are in their infancy, financial institutions typically impose stringent collateral requirements for larger loans. Women are less likely than men to own large, collateralizable assets such as housing, land, or vehicles due to inheritance practices, unequal land ownership laws, and social customs. Innovative solutions to replace or reduce the reliance on fixed-asset collateral may help to expand access to capital for growth-oriented women owned firms.