Publication: Remarks at CARE Conference on Gender Equality, Washington, D.C., March 5, 2014
Loading...
Published
2014-03-05
ISSN
Date
2016-05-24
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group, shares the good news that the governors of the World Bank Group have set ambitious goals to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries. He noted that increased economic activity among women has translated into a reduction in poverty by about 30 percent and has helped insulate their households from the recent financial shocks. We need to address our blind spots. We need to draw more attention to the major constraints for women and girls that are right in front of us. Discrimination and prejudice destroy economic opportunity. He reminds us that Malala Yousafzai started a social movement around education for girls first in Pakistan, and then around the world. If we can even begin to move together with that kind of resolve, the world will be more peaceful, more prosperous, more just and worthy of the mothers who gave birth to us.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Kim, Jim Yong. 2014. Remarks at CARE Conference on Gender Equality, Washington, D.C., March 5, 2014. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24340 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Charting a Programmatic Roadmap for Sexual Minority Groups in India(Washington, DC, 2012-07)Discrimination and stigma are constant companions in the life of the rainbow people. Apart from the demand for decriminalization, the main issues that confront the community are discrimination and violence, recognition of alternative family structures, adoption and property rights, and access to social security measures including identity documentation, welfare schemes, and education and health services. In order to establish a realistic plan for their inclusion into state provided services and liberties, it was important to understand what prevents them from doing so at this time, and to develop a carefully crafted roadmap for actions that the State, community and other stakeholders can program into their day-to-day work. Sexual minorities have fought a long battle against discrimination. Criminalization of Hijra and homosexuals took place during the colonial period and Lord Macaulay drafted the now infamous section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) according to the law, voluntary carnal intercourse against the order of nature could be punished by imprisonment. Laws such as section 377 have long been removed in most western democracies, although they persist in many post-colonial countries in Asia and Africa. In 2009, the Delhi High Court also read down the law, legalizing same sex consensual homosexual activities between adults. This judgment is unfortunately now challenged at the Supreme Court of India which is currently hearing the arguments of either side. The decriminalization of the community remains a fundamental issue which needs resolution if the community is to attain its rightful due. Continued advocacy on the part of the community and education of its people in the implications of the 2009 High Court judgment are important steps.Publication Women's Voice and Agency : The Role of Legal Institutions and Women's Movements(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014)Global events like the Beijing Women s Conference of 1995 have resulted in the creation of strong international frameworks that set standards for women s rights around the world. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Beijing Platform for Action, and other international norms define the scope of universal rights for women and girls, and have opened new spaces for regional and national legal reform. Bottom-up engagement with these international laws and institutions by local and transnational women s movements has catalyzed widespread changes in lawmaking and transformed standard-setting documents into tools for reform. The following paper discusses four important pillars of women s voice and agency (while recognizing that there are others which are beyond the scope of this review): freedom from the risk of violence; freedom of movement; freedom to make decisions on family formation and the freedom to shape policy. It will examine the ways in which these freedoms impact women s voice and the ways in which women are working to reform law and policy to ensure these four freedoms are accessible to all.Publication Transformative Resilience Guide : Gender, Violence, and Education(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013)The Education Resilience Approaches (ERA) program is developing frameworks and tools to understand the role and impact of education in conflict- and violence-affected contexts. This guide is for researchers, evaluators, and planners supporting education policy and program development in contexts of gender-related violence. It outlines a conceptual framework to support the collection, interpretation, and use of gender- and resilience-related information. In addition, it also includes how-to advice to think through crucial issues, which may arise when assessing areas of protection for people in all levels of an education system who experience gender-related violence, as well as to promote improved educational outcome. This guide is divided into two parts, plus an initial chapter on general aspects of gender and resilience in situations of conflict and violence. Together, the parts present, respectively, core guidance on gender-related risks and assets, and the ways that schools, communities, and education systems can respond to protect education actors from gender-related violence, as well as contribute to mitigating the sources of such violence. Each chapter has a list of core principles related to its focus, along with recommended resources. In Part 1, chapters 2 and 3 provide a broad framework and specific multi-level examples of gender-related risks and assets. Most importantly, it presents a list of essential principles, tools, and resources for researchers, evaluators, and program designers as they conduct their own specific gender, violence, and education assessments. Part 2 is focused on institutional issues. Chapter 4 discusses the ways that positive interactions between schools and communities can prevent gender-based violence and foster gender equity. Chapter 5 considers the education policies, programs, institutions, and services that address the sources of gender-related risks and craft solutions for positive education outcomes. Examples of institutional practices illustrate how a transformative resilience framework and gender principles can be operationalized within the policies, programs, and budgets of education systems.Publication Women, Business and the Law 2010 : Measuring Legal Gender Parity for Entrepreneurs and Workers in 128 Economies(Washington, DC, 2010)This report presents indicators based on laws and regulations affecting women's prospects as entrepreneurs and employees. Several of these indicators draw on the Gender Law Library, a collection of over 2,000 legal provisions impacting women's economic status. Both resources can inform research and policy discussions on how to improve women's economic opportunities and outcomes. The six indicators of gender differences in formal laws and institutions established in this report include: 1) accessing institutions, 2 ) using prpoerty, 3) getting a job, 4) dealing with taxes, 5) building credit, and 6) going to court. The first 3 indicators (accessing institutions, using property, and getting a job) capture laws that have direct gender dimensions and are based on a reading of such laws from the perspective of individual women. The 4th indicator (dealing with taxes) examines the direct and indirect gender implications of tax policy from the perspective of 4 standardized families with varying tax liabilities. The last 2 indicators (building credit and going to court) examine the ease of access to credit bureaus and courts to examine the indirect effects that microfinance institutions and dispute resolution have on women, who are more likely to rely on nontraditional financial services.Publication "They Are Not Like Us" : Understanding Social Exclusion(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02)Negative attitudes toward groups in society are widespread and underpin systematic processes of social exclusion that marginalize people and deny them opportunities and dignity. This paper looks at the processes underlying social exclusion. It uses data covering Eastern Europe and Central Asia to study the responses to a simple hypothetical survey question about which specific groups respondents would not like to have as neighbors. Unwelcoming attitudes toward groups such as immigrants, ethnic minorities, the poor, HIV+ individuals, and others are surprisingly common. These attitudes fall into three distinct clusters: intolerance for the poor and for different lifecycle stages; intolerance toward stigmatized attributes and behaviors; and intolerance toward specific identity groups. An empirical analysis of the determinants of attitudes shows that country-specific factors are far more important than socio-economic characteristics. These findings could have important implications for theories about exclusion and for the design of appropriate social inclusion policies. The authors argue that strategies to address social exclusion need to consider ways to change social norms, attitudes, and behaviors toward disadvantaged groups. The paper explores potential entry points for change within formal and informal institutions.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Adolescent Health(Washington, DC, 2002-11)More than a quarter of the world's population is between the ages of 10 and 24. Most (86 percent) of the world's 1.7 billion young people live in developing countries, where they are often 30 percent or more of the population. At first glance, youth appears to be a relatively healthy although not hazard-free period of life. Young people account for 15 percent of the disease and injury burden worldwide and over one million die each year, mainly from preventable causes. Nonetheless, roughly 70 percent of premature deaths among adults can be linked to behavior initiated during adolescence, such as tobacco use, poor eating habits, and risky sex. Investing in health and development of young people is not only the right thing to do, it's the smart thing for countries that want their economies to grow faster: 1) reducing HIV infection in young people will reduce the devastating economic impact of HIV/AIDS; 2) when young people postpone marriage and childbearing, family size falls and population growth slows. Combined with investments in health and education, these changes contribute to higher economic growth and incomes; and 3) investments to head off negative behaviors such as tobacco use and drug abuse will pay off later for individuals and for society.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Health and Growth : Commission on Growth and Development(World Bank, 2009)The commission on growth and development was established in April 2006. It felt that the benefits of growth were not fully appreciated, but also recognized that the causes of growth were not fully understood. Growth is often overlooked and underrated as an instrument for tackling the world's most pressing problems, such as poverty, illiteracy, income inequality, unemployment, and pollution. At the same time, grasp of the sources of growth in developing countries is less definitive than commonly thought even though advice is sometimes given to policy makers in these countries with great confidence, perhaps greater than the state of knowledge will justify. Consequently, the commission's mandate is to 'take stock of the state of theoretical and empirical knowledge on economic growth with a view to drawing implications for policy for the current and next generation of policy makers. Good health improves the capacity to learn and work, which dramatically improves income and welfare at the household level even if the effects at the aggregate level may be harder to discern. The methodological problems in capturing these gains deserve attention and further work. More attention also needs to be paid to upgrading healthcare institutions, as more of the same is neither affordable nor desirable.Publication At the Frontlines of Development : Reflections from the World Bank(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005)At the Frontlines of Development former World Bank country directors recount their experiences, both as managers of the World Bank's programs in global economic hotspots of the 1990s as well as throughout their careers in development economics. These essays detail, among many stories of development in the 1990s, how China and India lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while Russia collapsed; how Bosnia and Herzegovina and Mozambique remade their war-ravaged economies; and how Thailand, Turkey, and Argentina fell into financial crisis. These remarkable stories, told in first-person by the country directors who were there to witness them, provide candid assessments of development in the 1990s-what succeeded, what failed, and what lessons emerged.Publication Country Partnership Framework for the Republic of Liberia for the Period FY19 - FY24(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10-26)The Liberian economy is undergoing a process of structural transformation, as the dominanceof agriculture and mining gradually gives way to a rising services sector. Much of the Liberian economy is structured around foreign direct investment (FDI) and the development of private agricultural, mining, and forestry concessions. The Liberian economy showed signs of recovery in 2017-2018, amid significant fiscal and external imbalances. The medium-term outlook remains positive, assuming the new government maintains prudent macroeconomic policies, pursues a judicious borrowing policy, and implements planned structural reforms. The favorable medium-term growth outlook also assumes that sound macroeconomic management and structural reforms will strengthen investor confidence. The Government’s medium-term development strategy (July 2018-June 2023), the Pro-poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development (PAPD), is designed around the priorities set forth in President Weah’s inaugural speech and State of the Nation address: (i) combatting corruption; (ii) improving efficiency and accountability in the public sector; (iii) promoting honesty and transparency in the private sector; (iv) narrowing infrastructure gaps, especially in the southeast; and (v) creating jobs, especially for young workers. The Country Partnership Framework emphasizes the importance of shifting the focus of the WBG program from being infrastructure intensive under the previous CPS toward a more balanced approach with greater attention to education, agriculture, economic empowerment of women and youth, and maternal and child health. WBG will support smallholder commercialization and private-sector investment in agribusiness by fostering productive business linkages among smallholder farmers, selected agribusiness firms, and business-development services—with a special focus on constraints faced by women and youth.