Women in Development and Gender Study
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Publication 2023 State of the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Sector(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-14) World BankThe 2023 state of the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector focuses on the intersection of ASM and sustainable development goal 5 (SDG 5) - achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. It applies the SDG 5 framework for the first time to systematically report on gender inequalities in ASM. The 2023 Report builds on the 2019 and 2020 reports to close the global data gap facing the ASM. The obstacles confronting women in ASM span legal, social, and economic domains. These difficulties are exacerbated by the persisting gender-blindness within mining laws, resulting in discrimination against women miners and hindering their access to resources, education, and economic advancement, placing their safety and well-being at risk. Without action and reforms, women will remain unable to realize the full economic and social benefits afforded by a well-developed ASM sector. The 2023 State of the ASM sector report provides three key recommendations to improve SDG 5 outcomes in ASM: 1. Make mining legal frameworks gender inclusive; 2. Advance women’s social protections at the mine and home; and 3. Account for gendered differences in occupational health and safety efforts at mine sites.Publication Ten-thousand Steps in Her Shoes: The Role of Public Transport in Women’s Economic Empowerment – Evidence from Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-20) Alam, Muneeza Mehmood; Bagnoli, LisaThis report sheds light on public transport’s role in women’s access to economic opportunities in urban MENA. It examines the links among mobility, gender, and access to economic opportunities. It provides evidence of gender differences in mobility patterns and travel behavior, as well as the barriers and challenges women face when using public transport. It also assesses whether public transport systemdeficiencies constrain women’s economic participation. This report focuses on three metropolitan areas: Amman, Jordan; Beirut, Lebanon; and Cairo, Egypt. These cities were chosen for their contrasting size, context, and economic stability.Publication Integrating Gender in Land Projects: A Toolkit(Washington, DC, 2023-10-08) World BankThis Toolkit is aimed at practitioners, bi-lateral and multi-lateral organizations, and community and non-governmental organizations involved in land projects, programs and activities. It draws from secondary research and applies experience to provide a pathway to the successful integration of gender into the design and implementation of land projects, programs and activities to ensure women’s rights to housing, land and property are recognized and protected. The Toolkit provides users with a blueprint for building strategies and good practices to overcome the legal, social, and structural barriers preventing women from exercising their land rights. It aims to ensure significant and meaningful participation of women in land projects in all spaces, rural, peri-urban, and urban. The Toolkit will often refer to women’s land rights (WLR) and this term is broadly addressing women’s rights to housing, land, and real property (HLP). The Toolkit is organized around four broad project stages: (1) scoping, (2) design, (3) implementation, and (4) evaluation; but with an emphasis on scoping and design.Publication Navigating Education, Motherhood, and Informal Labor: The Experiences of Young Women in Luanda(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-26) World BankGender equality is a key foundation of inclusive and sustainable economic development that can translate into long-term and effective poverty reduction. While gender equality matters on its own as a human right, it also offers instrumental value for individuals, households, and societies at large. Global evidence consistently shows that empowering women and girls reduces poverty incidence and food insecurity, boosts economic growth and productivity, and enhances investments in children’s human capital. Angola, a country where a third of the population lives in poverty and economic output is heavily dependent on its oil sector, stands out in Sub-Saharan Africa for its particularly large gender disparities, especially when compared to countries of same income levels. Family formation, education, and labor market decisions are intrinsically interwoven and connected, which in the case of Angola leads to extreme demographic pressure on an already weak public service system. To begin tackling these significant gender disparities, well-designed and targeted policies are needed. But there are significant knowledge gaps when it comes to understanding the key barriers facing Angolan girls and young women in accessing education and transitioning to the labor market. This report presents insights gained from the voices of young women and girls, their parents, and key informants through a series of interviews carried out in Luanda, home to a quarter of the country’s population, in 2022. Based on these in-depth interviews with low-income young women in Luanda, this report points to the multiple challenges they face across their life cycle - challenges relating to the dimensions of education, family formation, and work. It also shows how those dimensions in a woman’s life are deeply interconnected - and how they are determined by structural constraints including poverty and vulnerability, gender norms, corruption and lack of transparency in access to services and opportunities, and violence in public and private spheres.Publication Gender and Property Taxes in São Paulo(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-15) World BankThis knowledge note provides new evidence on property ownership and taxation patterns across genders in São Paulo (Brazil), the largest city in the Americas, with 12 million inhabitants. We exploit microdata on all commercial and residential properties to document the share of total property and property wealth owned by women, the geographic distribution of female-owned properties, and the implications of this data for property taxes in the city.Publication Gender and Taxpayer Study in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan: In Preparation for the One-Stop Taxpayer Facilitation Centers(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-15) Komatsu, Hitomi; Touqeer, IrumThis study supports the KP provincial government’s efforts to facilitate women’s voluntary tax compliance by understanding women’s constraints and experiences in tax payment and property registration and the gender gaps in access to and use of digital technologies. It draws data from a survey, which interviewed 1,200 current taxpayers and nontaxpayers (a third of whom were women), focus group discussions with women and female tax administrators, and key informant interviews with senior directors of the KP tax administrations. It identifies specific challenges women face in property registration and tax payments, such as restricted mobility, and lack of information and unclear processes. It also reveals that women’s challenges are not monolithic, but varies by education; therefore, tailored measures are important to meet the needs of different types of taxpayers. While digitization of tax services could reduce tax compliance costs for taxpayers, women with limited education may not fully benefit from digitization because they tend to lack ownership of mobile devices and to have limited use of digital banking and wallet applications. The importance of having female staff provide tax and property registration services dedicated to women, simplifying property registration processes, and using easy Urdu and Pashto are highlighted by female taxpayers. Establishing dedicated services for women by assigning female tax officials in one-stop Tax Facilitation Centers could also help women register property and pay taxes. But to retain staff, these changes require allocation of human and financial resources, review of staff roles, additional training, instituting a gender-equitable and safe workplace environment and physical infrastructure, including bathrooms and separate areas for women. Digitizing and sex-disaggregating taxpayer and service user data could help revenue authorities develop tailored programs and services that meet the needs of women and men and monitor progress. Such data would be useful in guiding tax administrations to allocate financial and human resources.Publication An Assessment of Gender Gaps in Liberia through a Women’s Empowerment Lens(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-11) Cunningham, Wendy; Johansson de Silva, SaraAdvancing gender equality by strengthening women’s empowerment is essential for improving development outcomes in Liberia. This report draws on existing literature and data review, as well as new qualitative evidence collected in Liberia. It shows that despite some progress, significant gender gaps still hold back the individual well-being of half of the population. Although abject poverty is part of the story, formal and informal institutions that shift the balance of decision-making power and access to resources away from women also disempower. Eliminating institutional and resource constraints and strengthening women’s ability to make choices to improve their lives can leverage women’s skills and talents and enhance their contributions to a more prosperous and sustainable Liberia. This report is grounded in the concepts underlying women’s and girls’ empowerment - namely, a process whereby women and girls who have been denied the ability to make choices and realize them acquire such an ability. The analysis is focused on identifying the constraints Liberian women face in achieving better outcomes in education, health, and productive employment, through the lens of the three pillars of empowerment: context, resources, and agency.Publication Moving from Traditional to Transformational Approaches to Women’s Economic Empowerment - A Review of the KDRDIP Program(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-09-01) World BankThis paper aims to answer two important questions: how traditional CDD livelihood projects can adjust or adopt practices to strengthen women’s economic empowerment outcomes, and how government and other development actors can employ an ecosystem approach to develop coordinated and sustainable local economic development on a larger scale. To answer these questions, the paper draws on a mixed-methods study of the Kenya Development Response to Displacement Impacts Project (KDRDIP), a traditional CDD livelihood program, along with an analysis of other WEE programs in the region and worldwide. The paper offers useful recommendations and insights for practitioners and policymakers.Publication An Operational Approach to Enhancing Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in World Bank Projects(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-28) World BankGender equality has long been central to the World Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. More recently, women’s and girls’ empowerment (WGE) has become a priority in the Africa region in the context of the region’s demographic transition. There has been a proliferation of World Bank projects with development objectives that include “empowerment”, yet there remains a lack of consensus around its definition and operationalization. This note lays out a pragmatic Operational Approach to enhancing women’s and girls’ empowerment in World Bank projects. It is not intended to provide a new definition of empowerment or to present a new framework. Instead, the objective of the note is to translate widely accepted empowerment concepts into an operational approach to WGE that Bank Task Team Leaders (TTLs) can use in their project and ASA work. The approach includes: (i) a systematic way to analyze constraints to achieving WGE in the context of lending or analytical products; (ii) a list of potential intervention areas within the three empowerment pillars that can be integrated into World Bank projects; and (iii) guidance on how to incorporate the operational approach to WGE into project design.Publication Global Evidence on Context and Agency Interventions to Empower Women and Girls(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-25) World BankAs 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.