Publication: Accelerating Gender Equality Through Social Protection
Loading...
Date
2024-10-21
ISSN
Published
2024-10-21
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The World Bank’s Gender Strategy (2024-2030) aims to tackle both formal and informal barriers to gender inequality, including power imbalances that often affect women and girls disproportionally. To achieve enduring gender equality, there must be collective action to influence transformative changes in laws, policies, and programming grounded in a deeper understanding of the interaction between different actors and stakeholders at the individual, household, community, and institutional levels. This note outlines how social protection contributes to the objectives of the World Bank’s Gender Strategy, which are to end GBV and elevate human capital, expand and enable economic opportunities, and engage women as leaders. This note presents evidence and operational experience on how social protection can boost gender equality and women and girls’ empowerment outcomes and discusses challenges that need to be addressed to maximize the impact of social protection interventions at scale. Recommendations are offered on ways to further amplify gender equality outcomes.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Al-Ahmadi, Afrah; Heinemann, Alessandra; Mossman, Lindsay; Rawlings, Laura. 2024. Accelerating Gender Equality Through Social Protection. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42271 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Increasing Gender Equality in Fragile, Conflict, and Violence Settings(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-17)Fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) significantly impact women and girls, exacerbating gender-based violence and limiting access to rights and services due to weakened institutions. Positive changes can emerge from crises, providing opportunities to reshape social norms and empower women. Achieving gender equality in these settings requires tailored approaches that consider local dynamics and involve influential non-state actors. The World Bank Group's experience suggests that partnerships, strengthened laws, and inclusive policies can enhance outcomes. Sustainable progress demands increased investment, innovation in data collection, and collaboration among governments, NGOs, and the private sector to address these complex challenges effectively.Publication Addressing Care to Accelerate Equality(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-08)The care economy is essential in daily life and a driver of economic growth, human capital development, and employment. Gender is a defining characteristic of the care economy. Women spend 3.2 times more time on unpaid care work than men and constitute the majority of the care workforce. Disproportionate unpaid care responsibilities and a lack of access to quality, accessible, affordable care services impede women’s economic participation and affect their overall well-being. Investments in the care sector are essential to accelerate equality and could generate up to 299 million jobs worldwide by 2035. Globally, the need for care services is high. Worldwide, 43 percent of all children below primary-school-entry age—350 million children—need childcare but do not have access to it. The need for eldercare is also growing as the population continues to age and face chronic health conditions. The World Bank actively supports countries in addressing this care crisis. This thematic policy note reviews many of the issues, evidence, and lessons learned.Publication Results Readiness in Social Protection and Labor Operations(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-02)The main focus of the social protection and labor portfolio is on strengthening client's institutional capacity in the design and implementation of programs, but projects are not well equipped to track progress in this area. Correspondingly, there is a need to strengthen approaches to measuring and monitoring a 'missing middle' of service delivery, precisely those areas for which counterpart institutions are responsible during the course of a project. In particular, better measures of the primary functions of social protection and labor agencies are needed, such as identifying and enrolling beneficiaries, targeting, payment systems, fraud and error control, performance monitoring of service delivery providers, responsiveness to citizens, transparency, efficiency, management information systems and monitoring and evaluation systems. New World Bank initiatives particularly standard core indicators by sector and the introduction of results based investment lending call for substantial improvements in the use of monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Impact evaluations are included in about half of projects and should continue to be used selectively and strategically, particularly when the program is innovative, replicable and/ or scalable to reach a broader set of beneficiaries, addresses a knowledge gap and is likely to have a substantial policy impact. Structuring evaluations around core themes with common outcome measures is fundamental to building a global knowledge base on development effectiveness.Publication More than Mainstreaming : Promoting Gender Equality and Empowering Women through Post-Disaster Reconstruction(World Bank, Jakarta, 2012-12)The Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias (MDF) and the Java Reconstruction Fund (JRF) have played significant roles in the remarkable recovery of Aceh, Nias and Java, following some of the worst disasters in Indonesia in recent years. The MDF and the JRF, which is patterned after it, are each considered a highly successful model for post-disaster reconstruction. This paper presents lessons from the MDF and JRF's efforts to facilitate women's empowerment and gender equality during the reconstruction process. The reconstruction process presented opportunity to address gender issues and other social inequalities. Enhancing the role of women under the MDF and JRF programs saw significant results, such as improved and sustained outcomes in housing and infrastructure, faster economic and livelihood recovery and increased productivity, strengthening of women's legal rights, more representative decision making and enhanced resilience for women and communities.Publication Women's Retirement Age in Vietnam : Gender Equality and Sustainability of the Social Security Fund(World Bank, 2009-01-01)The issue of the retirement age is fundamentally linked to policies on social protection. It is an issue that inevitably causes debate and has proponents, men and women, who argue on both sides. During preparation of the gender equality law in Vietnam, several options were presented for changing the retirement age of women. However, the National Assembly could not make a decision as the debate was rife with mostly emotional arguments. A more constructive dialogue could be pursued if presented with economic and social arguments of each option, or alternative options. During the labor code revision in 2009, this study will hopefully provide a good basis for decision making as well as for further policy dialogue on the issue. The main objective of this study is to provide economic and social arguments on different options for women's retirement age in Vietnam to serve as a basis for further consultation and policy dialogue with the Government.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Women, Business and the Law 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-04)Women, Business and the Law 2024 is the 10th in a series of annual studies measuring the enabling conditions that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies. To present a more complete picture of the global environment that enables women’s socioeconomic participation, this year Women, Business and the Law introduces two new indicators—Safety and Childcare—and presents findings on the implementation gap between laws (de jure) and how they function in practice (de facto). This study presents three indexes: (1) legal frameworks, (2) supportive frameworks (policies, institutions, services, data, budget, and access to justice), and (3) expert opinions on women’s rights in practice in the areas measured. The study’s 10 indicators—Safety, Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Childcare, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension—are structured around the different stages of a woman’s working life. Findings from this new research can inform policy discussions to ensure women’s full and equal participation in the economy. The indicators build evidence of the critical relationship between legal gender equality and women’s employment and entrepreneurship. Data in Women, Business and the Law 2024 are current as of October 1, 2023.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 Business Ready 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03)Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.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 Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.