At a Glance - During the past decades, women’s and girls’ education and health levels have improved greatly.
- Two-thirds of all countries have now reached gender parity in primary education, while in over one-third, girls significantly outnumber boys in secondary education.
- There are now more women than men in universities across the globe, with women’s tertiary enrollment rising more than sevenfold since 1970.
- Female life expectancy has increased by 20 to 25 years in most regions in the past 50 years, to reach 71 globally in 2007 (compared with 67 for men).
- But in many parts of the world, too many women are still dying in childbirth or, at alarming rates, not being born at all. Women still lack voice and the ability to participate in decisions that impact them, their families and their societies; and their economic opportunities remain very constrained.
- For every 1 woman who dies in childbirth in Sweden, there are: 122 women who die in Pakistan, 495 in Nigeria, 815 in Somalia, and 1000 in Afghanistan.
- As many as 34 percent of married women in Malawi, 28 percent of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 18 percent of married women in India and 14 percent in Nepal are largely silent on how their earned money is spent.
- Across the world, women consistently trail men in formal labor force participation, access to credit, entrepreneurship rates, income levels, and inheritance and ownership rights.
- This inequality is manifestly unfair. It is also bad economics: under-investing in women puts a brake on poverty reduction and limits economic and social development. This is systematically documented in the upcoming World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development.
What We Do - The World Bank supports gender equality by financing projects and programs, developing knowledge and analysis, and by leveraging partnerships. Financing operations cover a range of sectors, from increasing access to quality schooling to efforts to increase women’s economic opportunity.
·         Financing operations: Over the last five years (FY06 - FY10) the World Bank Group allocated more than $65 billion, or 37 percent of the World Bank's lending and grants, to gender-informed operations in education, health, access to land, financial and agricultural services, jobs, and infrastructure. In 2010, the share of gender-informed support reached almost half of our total lending, some $26.3 billion. - Increasing knowledge and awareness: The 2012 World Development Report is the first in the series to focus exclusively on gender equality and development: http://www.worldbank.org/wdr2012. The WDR highlights four areas where gender gaps are most significant―where direct policy efforts are required since higher incomes alone will do little to reduce existing gaps: Reducing excess female mortality and closing education gaps; Improving access to economic opportunities for women and reducing earnings and productivity gaps between women and men; Increasing women’s voice and agency in the household and in society; and, Limiting the reproduction of gender inequality across generations. Following the global release of the 2012 WDR, at the World Bank’s Annual Meetings in September 2011, the report will be launched in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and Central Asia , Latin America and the Caribbean as well as in Europe and North America.
Leveraging global and country-level partnerships to help implement priority actions: The World Bank is partnering with a series of institutions to help promote gender equality, including with UN Women; governments in high, middle and low income countries; civil society; and, the private sector. Initiatives include the World Bank Group-led Global Private Sector Leaders Forum, which seeks to expand women’s economic opportunities.
Why We Do It - Gender equality is a development goal in its own right. In addition, under-investing in women limits economic growth and slows down poverty reduction, which is one reason that countries with greater gender equality tend to have lower poverty rates. Evidence links increases in women’s productivity and earnings to lower household poverty and to better health and education outcomes for household members, especially children.
Recent Highlights - Gender mainstreaming in operations: The World Bank launched Applying Gender Action Plan Lessons: A Three-Year Road Map for Gender Mainstreaming (2011- 2013), which aims to direct more of the Bank’s technical assistance, projects and programs towards giving women better economic opportunity. The Road Map draws on lessons from the implementation of the 2007 - 2011 Gender Action Plan which encouraged women’s economic empowerment by targeting World Bank operations in sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure, private sector and financial development.
- Increased financing for poor countries: Gender is a special theme of the Bank’s $49.2 billion fund for the poorest countries, the International Development Association (IDA), for the coming three-year period. This means the Bank will be putting more emphasis on gender-related operations and support.
- Frontier knowledge products: The Bank will also release its report, Women, Business and the Law, in September to explore the gender differentiations in legal and regulatory environments which ultimately shape women's economic opportunities: http://wbl.worldbank.org/
Some examples of gender-related development results - Increasing economic opportunities: In Tanzania the Gender Action Plan complemented the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Gender Entrepreneurship Markets work in establishing lines of credit for women entrepreneurs. In Tanzania, an IFC credit line of US$5 million with Exim Bank enabled 214 women to access over US $8 million in credit to expand their small or medium sized businesses. http://go.worldbank.org/9VTCHC6HQ0
- Promoting access to basic services: In Lao PDR, the House Wiring Assistance Program was designed to enable poor rural households, which are disproportionately female-headed, to access electricity. The project offers these households a concessionary credit of $80 million to cover the high cost of connecting to the electricity grid. The implementation of the pilot project, Power to the Poor, was launched in September 2008. Connection rates in the 20 pilot villages increased from 78 percent to 95 percent overall, and from 63 percent to 90 percent for female-headed households. http://go.worldbank.org/GG6C607UA0
- Generating knowledge: A Gender Action Plan-funded study in Ethiopia examined a program that issued 20 million land-use certificates to six million households. It found that by providing space for both spouses’ names and photos on the certificate, women’s registration for land ownership increased significantly, with women reporting improved economic and social status. Evidence of the positive impact of this cost-effective measure influenced a decision to support a $30 million nationwide program that increased land-registration and certification throughout the country. http://go.worldbank.org/6RLMMPB9I0
For more examples of gender-related work, please visit: http://www.worldbank.org/gender Contact: Alejandra Viveros, (202) 473-4306, aviveros@worldbank.org Updated November 2011. |
