Archive: Promising Approaches to Engendering Development

The Promising Approaches to Engendering Development series showcases projects, research, and other World Bank Group activities that use innovative gender-responsive approaches to address gender inequalities

 

Anchoring Gender in Transport Projects / Rural Roads Perú and Rural Roads Mexico (Guerrero), 2008
(PDF 129KB)

The project builds a focus on gender into the nationwide Bank supported Lifelong Learning Project ChileCalifica, which seeks to improve the availability and quality of training programs and the overall effectiveness of employment services. The pilot training will include 200  participants in a region where female labor force participation is among the lowest in the country with the aim of integrating programs to improve access, training and employment service for women into national policy.

In this project, the private sector provided credit to the rural poor to buy land and the public sector provided training and technical services. As a result, the income of the members has increased 130% in average. During the course of the project, 100% of women members were trained; however only 20% of women members were able to acquire land.

Participatory Approaches to Increasing Women’s Voice in CDD Projects: Examples from Indonesia, 2004 (PDF 138KB)

Both the Kecamatan Development Projects (KDP) and the Water and Sanitation for Low Income Communities Projects (WSLIC) in Indonesia have successfully used transparency tools and regulations to ensure that women have access to community decision –making processes, have their infrastructure needs met and have a stake in project success. This included holding separate meetings for women, social mapping of households to ensure new infrastructure is located near poor or female-headed households, and ensuring that women and men have equal representation and voting power in infrastructure maintenance and decision-making committees.

Using a recent example from Cambodia, this note illustrates the advantages of using a gender-disaggregated benefit-incidence analysis when conducting a public expenditure review and designing public expenditure programs. The use of this analysis technique, together with household survey data, enabled Cambodia’s Public Expenditure Review (IFAPER) to identify appropriate priorities for resource allocation and ways to manage expenditures more effectively, including the identification of ways to cost-effectively increase female lower secondary education enrollments and create alternative financing mechanisms for women in the health and agricultural sectors.

Andhra Pradesh Collective Enterprise and Action, 2004 (PDF 141KB)

The Velugu program to empower poor women in rural Andhra Pradesh, India is the focus of this note, which describes an approach to empowerment that focuses on collective enterprises and action by women's self-help groups. Project activities have led to increases in group members’ capital and freedom of choice; better access to markets and business services; improved and more accessible basic services; and easier access to the justice system.

 

This note describes a rural transport project in Peru that, by involving rural women in its design and implementation, was able to enhance social outcomes and poverty reduction, promote market participation and increase gender equality. By ensuring that at least 20 percent of road committee members, 10 percent of road maintenance micro-enterprise members and 30 percent of direct beneficiaries in Local Development Window projects were women, the project enabled women to play a central role in community decision-making and ensured that transport systems heavily used by women, such as pedestrian tracks, were repaired and improved.

Beyond 'One-Size fits all":  Equitable Downsizing in Vietnam, 2004 (PDF 207KB)

This newsletter highlights experiences of PRSC-supported gender sensitive downsizing in Vietnam, using the Excel-based Downsizing Options Simulation Exercise tool. Based on this, the Vietnamese Government modified its severance compensation package to ensure that women do not bear a disproportionate share of the losses of the downsizing program.

Land and Use Rights and Gender Equality in Vietnam, 2003 (PDF 554KB)

A pilot project in north central Vietnam has instituted an approach to land titling that gives both women and men rights to use land. The project has promoted a gender-responsive, low cost, and decentralized method of land titling, by re-issuing Land Tenure Certificates that have space to register two names to enable  the wife and the husband to be joint holders of the property.

Electricity, Productivity, and Empowerment in Char Montaz, 2002 (PDF 818KB)

Char Montaz, an isolated rural island in southern Bangladesh is the setting for a model project to deliver low-cost renewable energy services.  The project trained women to manage a cooperatively owned micro-enterprise that manufactures and sells energy products.  Within two years, over 1,200 households, shops and boats started using battery-operated.