Publication: Global Evidence on Context and Agency Interventions to Empower Women and Girls
Loading...
Published
2023-07-25
ISSN
Date
2023-07-25
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
As gender equity becomes more central to social and economic development, practitioners are increasingly focused on women and girls’ empowerment as a sustainable way to enhance well-being and close gender gaps. The operational approach to women and girls’ empowerment can guide practitioners in systematically translating the concept of empowerment into project designs. While World Bank projects are fairly effective at providing women and girls with the resources they need to reach their desired achievements, interventions that affect agency and context are much more scarce. This literature review is intended to provide a curated set of examples of interventions that aim to affect the context and agency factors impeding women’s and girls’ empowerment. The paper starts from the assumption that practitioners are increasingly convinced of the importance of addressing the three pillars of empowerment, but they are unfamiliar with evidence-based context and agency interventions. Information about effective initiatives is dispersed, often leaving task teams to start from zero rather than drawing on prior experience. This paper sorts through the literature and presents some of the most effective examples of agency and context interventions in developing countries.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2023. Global Evidence on Context and Agency Interventions to Empower Women and Girls. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/40078 License: CC BY-NC 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 Voice and Agency : Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity(Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2014)The 2012 World Development Report recognized that expanding women's agency - their ability to make decisions and take advantage of opportunities is key to improving their lives as well as the world. This report represents a major advance in global knowledge on this critical front. The vast data and thousands of surveys distilled in this report cast important light on the nature of constraints women and girls continue to face globally. This report identifies promising opportunities and entry points for lasting transformation, such as interventions that reach across sectors and include life-skills training, sexual and reproductive health education, conditional cash transfers, and mentoring. It finds that addressing what the World Health Organization has identified as an epidemic of violence against women means sharply scaling up engagement with men and boys. The report also underlines the vital role information and communication technologies can play in amplifying women's voices, expanding their economic and learning opportunities, and broadening their views and aspirations. The World Bank Group's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity demand no less than the full and equal participation of women and men, girls and boys, around the world.Publication Empowering Women : Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-11)In societies with widespread gender discrimination, development programs that encourage female participation in local governance can potentially redress gender imbalances in economic, political, and social outcomes. Using a randomized field experiment encompassing 500 Afghan villages, this study finds that a development program which incorporates mandated female participation increases female mobility and involvement in income generation, but does not change female roles in family decision-making or attitudes toward the general role of women in society.Publication Empowering Adolescent Girls in a Crisis Context(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-07)In Sierra Leone, the empowerment and livelihoods for adolescents (ELA) initiative sought to enhance adolescent girls’ social and economic empowerment by providing life skills training, livelihood training, and credit support to start income-generating activities. The Ebola crisis occurred during the project, resulting in curbed implementation. In contrast, younger girls (12 to 17 years old) who resided in communities that benefitted from the program in high Ebola disruption areas were more likely to be in school and saw their numeracy and literacy levels improve. However, as younger women spend less time with men in the presence of ELA, men likely shift their attention to older girls: the evaluation finds an increase in unwanted and transactional sex by older girls in areas highly exposed to the Ebola crisis. As the program was implemented, the Ebola epidemic hit Sierra Leone. First, in an effort to stem the spread of the disease, the government-imposed quarantines, limited travel, and closed public spaces such as markets in certain areas, which significantly impacted the economic activities of men and women. Second, schools were closed for an entire academic year. Finally, Sierra Leone’s limited health resources were diverted into caring for patients and preventing the spread of the epidemic, limiting their ability to attend to other issues such as sexual and reproductive health. These results show how safe spaces interventions can be effective even in the face of large-scale shocks such as Ebola crises as seen in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, as well as other shocks constraining economic and social life, by buffering girls from the adverse effects of crises.Publication Highlights from Africa SPJ: Empowering Women and Girls Through Social Protection(Washington DC, 2023-05-02)Women’s and girls’ empowerment (WGE) is a key priority for the World Bank’s engagement in the Africa region. Gender equality has long been central to the World Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The Bank has made substantial investments aimed at closing gaps between men and women as well as advancing our understanding of what works to close those gaps. However, only recently has the Bank recognized WGE as a policy goal in its own right. WGE emerged a key strategy for human capital development in Africa in 2019. This highlights the need for guidance and tools to help task teams operationalize the WGE agenda in the regionPublication Interventions to Prevent or Reduce Violence Against Women and Girls : A Systematic Review of Reviews(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014)Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) is a pervasive global problem. It is a violation of basic human rights and a drag on development. Much of the research to-date on the topic-including a major recent World Health Organization study to produce global prevalence rates has focused on better understanding the scale and nature of the problem. The present study builds on this body or research while shifting focus to synthesizing global evidence on potential solutions. This paper, a systematic review of reviews, breaks new ground by synthesizing evidence on the effects of VAWG prevention interventions. It examines the diversity of geographical context, the types of violence addressed, and the numerous approaches that have been used to combat VAWG. Additionally the review summarizes the quality of evidence on efficacy and effectiveness in order to highlight strengths and gaps of interventions on a global scale and could serve as a point of reference for those intending to undertake future design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions. This paper finds that knowledge of intervention impacts on VAWG prevention is growing, but is still highly limited. Nonetheless, a small but growing body of rigorously tested interventions demonstrates that preventing VAWG is possible and can achieve large effect sizes. The interventions with the most positive findings used multiple, well-integrated approaches and engaged with multiple stakeholders over time. They also addressed underlying risk factors for violence, including social norms regarding gender dynamics and the acceptability of violence. These examples point to the imperative of greatly increasing investment both in innovative programming in primary prevention, as well as in high-quality experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations to guide international efforts to end VAWG.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Shifting Gears: The Private Sector as an Engine of Growth in the Middle East and North Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-23)The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is estimated to have grown at a modest rate of 1.9 percent in 2024 and is expected to grow moderately at 2.6 percent in 2025. This is against a backdrop of increased global uncertainty, particularly in trade policy. The region is far from the frontier in standards of living, largely due to low productivity. This issue of the MENA Economic Update sheds light on a critical engine of productivity growth: the private sector. Businesses create jobs, boost livelihoods, and serve as a bastion of innovation in the economy. The MENA private sector, however, is not dynamic and is ill prepared to absorb shocks. To boost the performance of the private sector, governments in the region may need to rethink their role in engaging with markets including improving competition, the business environment, and the availability of data. Additionally, private sector businesses in the region can increase performance through better management practices and harnessing untapped talent in the region.Publication Digital Opportunities in African Businesses(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-16)Adoption of digital technologies is widely acknowledged to boost productivity and employment, stimulate investment, and promote growth and development. Africa has already benefited from a rapid diffusion of information and communications technology, characterized by the widespread adoption of mobile phones. However, access to and use of digital technology among firms is uneven in the region, varying not just among countries but also within them. Consequently, African businesses may not be reaping the full potential benefits offered by ongoing improvements in digital infrastructure. Using rich datasets, “Digital Opportunities in African Businesses” offers a new understanding of the region’s incomplete digitalization—namely, shortfalls in the adoption and effective use of digital technology by firms to perform productive tasks. The research presented here also highlights the challenges in addressing incomplete digitalization, finding that the cost of machinery, equipment, and software, as well as the cost of connectivity to the internet, is significantly more expensive in Africa than elsewhere. “Digital Opportunities in African Businesses” outlines ways in which the private sector, with support from policy makers, international institutions, and regulators, can help bring down these costs, stimulating more widespread digitalization of the region’s firms, thereby boosting productivity and, by extension, economic development. This book will be relevant to anyone with an interest in furthering digitalization across Africa.Publication World Development Report 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-01)Middle-income countries are in a race against time. Many of them have done well since the 1990s to escape low-income levels and eradicate extreme poverty, leading to the perception that the last three decades have been great for development. But the ambition of the more than 100 economies with incomes per capita between US$1,100 and US$14,000 is to reach high-income status within the next generation. When assessed against this goal, their record is discouraging. Since the 1970s, income per capita in the median middle-income country has stagnated at less than a tenth of the US level. With aging populations, growing protectionism, and escalating pressures to speed up the energy transition, today’s middle-income economies face ever more daunting odds. To become advanced economies despite the growing headwinds, they will have to make miracles. Drawing on the development experience and advances in economic analysis since the 1950s, World Development Report 2024 identifies pathways for developing economies to avoid the “middle-income trap.” It points to the need for not one but two transitions for those at the middle-income level: the first from investment to infusion and the second from infusion to innovation. Governments in lower-middle-income countries must drop the habit of repeating the same investment-driven strategies and work instead to infuse modern technologies and successful business processes from around the world into their economies. This requires reshaping large swaths of those economies into globally competitive suppliers of goods and services. Upper-middle-income countries that have mastered infusion can accelerate the shift to innovation—not just borrowing ideas from the global frontiers of technology but also beginning to push the frontiers outward. This requires restructuring enterprise, work, and energy use once again, with an even greater emphasis on economic freedom, social mobility, and political contestability. Neither transition is automatic. The handful of economies that made speedy transitions from middle- to high-income status have encouraged enterprise by disciplining powerful incumbents, developed talent by rewarding merit, and capitalized on crises to alter policies and institutions that no longer suit the purposes they were once designed to serve. Today’s middle-income countries will have to do the same.Publication World Bank Annual Report 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-25)This annual report, which covers the period from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, has been prepared by the Executive Directors of both the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)—collectively known as the World Bank—in accordance with the respective bylaws of the two institutions. Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group and Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, has submitted this report, together with the accompanying administrative budgets and audited financial statements, to the Board of Governors.Publication Global Economic Prospects, June 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-10)The global economy is facing another substantial headwind, emanating largely from an increase in trade tensions and heightened global policy uncertainty. For emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), the ability to boost job creation and reduce extreme poverty has declined. Key downside risks include a further escalation of trade barriers and continued policy uncertainty. These challenges are exacerbated by subdued foreign direct investment into EMDEs. Global cooperation is needed to restore a more stable international trade environment and scale up support for vulnerable countries grappling with conflict, debt burdens, and climate change. Domestic policy action is also critical to contain inflation risks and strengthen fiscal resilience. To accelerate job creation and long-term growth, structural reforms must focus on raising institutional quality, attracting private investment, and strengthening human capital and labor markets. Countries in fragile and conflict situations face daunting development challenges that will require tailored domestic policy reforms and well-coordinated multilateral support.