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Women and Law

Breaking new ground for the World Bank

This is the fourth in a DevNews series on gender and the World Bank. Timed to coincide with International Women's Day on March 8, the series aims to showcase how far the Bank has come in its gender efforts since the 1995 Beijing gender conference. Today's story takes a look at the work the Bank is doing in terms of gender and law.

“The beautiful thing about law reform is that it’s not an expensive undertaking, but it can produce dramatic results,” says World Bank Senior Counsel Karen Hudes. “A striking example is education, a sector which yields the biggest social returns on investment. When you increase opportunity by changing the law, you multiply that return on investment.”






	“The beautiful thing about law reform is that it’s not an expensive undertaking, but it can produce dramatic results,” says World Bank Senior Counsel Karen Hudes



	“We sought to discover issues as seen by stakeholders rather than presenting packages to them,” says Gita Gopal, who helped initiate the project

Hudes is heading up some groundbreaking work for the Bank, using a grant from the gender and law thematic group to carry out an assessment of equality opportunity for women in Vietnam. Hudes and her team will look at the country’s legal framework—the laws and constitution, and actual practice and customary law—to identify areas of weakness.

“As the problems are identified and groups within the country validate them, it is hoped that there will be a drive within the country for law reform, as long as such projects be driven by the interests of national authorities and carried out by local civil groups,” says Hudes. “This is much more proactive than the Bank has been before.”

The Asia Development Bank recently carried out similar assessments in four countries, and the Bank’s efforts are aimed at picking up the remaining East Asian countries. “Our hope is to pilot the terms of reference for this assessment so that when country assistance strategies are done, the exercise will be incorporated across the board,” says Hudes.

The gender and law program in place in the Bank’s East Africa region has been around since 1996 and was recently nominated for a Bank Award for Excellence. The subject of women and law is inherently sensitive in this region where cultural practices and religious laws may be perceived by the outside world as violations of women’s human rights. The success of the effort, then, say team members, has been the application of an exceptionally participatory process.

The project awarded small grants to several African countries to bring stakeholders together to identify their individual gender and law issues. Those priority issues were then brought by countries to a workshop attended by donors, at which World Bank representatives determined the areas to which they could lend support. The success of the program, called “Gender and Law: Eastern Africa Speaks,” say its architects, is based on country ownership—a government minister or high court judge leads a country team made up of members from non-governmental and private organizations.

“We sought to discover issues as seen by stakeholders rather than presenting packages to them,” says Gita Gopal, who helped initiate the project. “We’re working now in areas we’ve never worked on before, like violence against women.” Interestingly, the countries identified quite disparate priority areas. Following the donor meetings, each country refined action plans to meet donor requirements.

Small amounts of money have been going a long way, says Gopal. In Tanzania, for example, stakeholders identified the legal rights of women to land as a priority area. With very modest financing from the Bank for a participatory rural assessment, the Tanzanians prepared a report with four recommendations, three of which were adopted by the country’s parliament in passing its recent land legislation.

Other operations have included an institutional development grant for Uganda for increasing the legal literacy of newly elected councilors and an institutional development grant for Zimbabwe for analyzing legal constrains and increasing awareness.

In the case of Ethiopia, these assessment efforts are being translated into a lending project pending Board approval. The Women’s Development Initiatives Project ($5 million, plus a $2 million donation from Italy) is a broad financing mechanism for small, local projects designed to increase women’s economic productivity. An information, education, and communication component will address attitude constraints vis-à-vis women’s legal rights.

The program is currently active in nine eastern African countries: Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Testament to the sensitivity of the project’s approach, five participating countries have requested the Bank to facilitate a dialogue within their countries on gender and Islam, and three countries have requested help to examine legal issues in the area of violence against women.

A number of initiatives are also underway in francophone sub-Saharan Africa, where a special World Bank gender and law team has been exploring the institutional, policy, and legal frameworks in these countries as they develop World Bank support mechanisms and incorporate gender sensitivities into country strategies. Country-specific reviews in 12 countries, carried out by NGOs and associations with World Bank technical support, have identified programs of technical assistance. Institutional Development Funds have been provided for the promotion of the legal status of women in Benin, Togo, Mali, and Mauritania. (Click here and here for more information.)

In some cases, substantial gender-related legal components have been incorporated into such lending operations as Mauritania’s Financial and Private Sector Capacity Loan and the recent Economic Recovery Credit for Rwanda. (See DevNews story on Women and World Bank Adjustment Lending.)

Taking legal reforms beyond the enactment of legislation to ensure implementation and enforcement, they are an element of judicial reform efforts being carried out in a number of countries and increasingly a component of reform-related lending projects. The Ecuador Judicial Reform Project ($10.7 million), for example, being implemented by the country’s supreme court, includes a program that provides small grants to civil groups for improved access to the judicial system.

Much of this grant financing is going to pilot legal service centers that provide services to low-income women, such as swift resolution of child support and custody cases and consultations services.

Helpful links: For more on the World Bank and gender issues, go to www.worldbank.org/gender/.