Mainstreaming Gender 
in the World Bank

Several major World Bank reports provide strong empirical evidence that the gender-based division of labor and the inequalities to which it gives rise tend to slow development, economic growth and poverty reduction. Gender inequalities often lower the productivity of labor, both in the short and long term, and create inefficiencies in labor allocation in households and the economy at large. They also contribute to poverty and reduce human well-being. These findings make clear that gender issues are an important dimension of the World Bank's fight against poverty. Promoting gender equality and women's empowerment are also central to the Millennium Development Goals, and to the commitments made by the World Bank's member countries at the Beijing Conference in 1995 and at the Beijing+5 follow-up meeting in 2000.

Mainstreaming Gender in the World Bank

The World Bank recognizes that its effectiveness in helping member countries achieve their development goals and reduce poverty can be enhanced by helping them take strategic actions designed to overcome the liabilities that gender inequalities represent for development and well-being. Since the 1980s, the World Bank has made progress in integrating gender issues into country work and lending. For example:

• Since the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 the World Bank has loaned some $5.3 billion for girls' education programs.
• The World Bank is the single largest lender in the world for health, nutrition and population projects. In fiscal year 1999, two-thirds of the loans in these areas included actions aimed at promoting gender equality.

Several organizational changes designed to facilitate greater attention to gender and development issues have also been made, including the issuance in 1994 of an Operational Policy on the gender dimension of development (OP 4.20), the creation of a Gender and Development (GAD) Board in 1997 and its placement within the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network (PREM), and the change of the head of the GAD Board from a chief/manager to a director in 1998. On September 18th, 2001 the World Bank's Board of Executive Directors discussed and endorsed a new World Bank wide gender mainstreaming strategy.  

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Recommendations

 To better understand gender issues and the best ways of addressing them in diverse contexts and  across networks requires that the Bank learn from its own and others' experience through project  design and implementation, research, and evaluations.

   Recommendation 1: Gender concerns should be fully addressed in social assess-ments, in the  selection of performance indicators, and in ICRs.

 The social development family should include in its forthcoming guidelines on social  assessment a discussion of how to link gender analysis, stakeholder analysis, and  social assessments.  Regional staff and management, with assistance from the opera-tions Policy  Department (OPR), should ensure that the ongoing "retooling" of monitoring and  evaluation indicators in the current portfolio (and especially in participation flagships  and pilot proj-ects) disaggregate data on men and women whenever appropriate.  OPR should stipulate in the ICR guidelines (Operational Policy 13.55, currently being  updated) that ICRs systematically check for and docu-ment results separately for men  and women, when data are available, whether the project included some  gender-related action or not.

  Recommendation 2: The Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Econo-mist should advance  the state of knowledge on gender issues by setting up a systematic program of research to examine  the gender impact of project lend-ing and policy reform.

 The research program should explicitly address both quantitative and qualitative  dimensions of gender and should focus on both micro- and macro-level issues.  Such research requires routine collection of gender-disaggregated data, not only  through projects but also through household survey instruments such as the Living  Standard Measurement Surveys.  The research should be undertaken in consultation with all net-works and OED.

 Typically, gender issues are location-specific, and the regional gender action plans rightly call for  systematic identification and prioritization of gender concerns during the CAS process, as stipulated  in the current gender policy and in the CAS guidelines (Best Practice 2.11). But the action plans2  may need to be adjusted in light of the more recent social development action plans and of the  ongoing restructuring in some regions. Furthermore, the action plans do not set clear, time-bound  implementation plans or mecha-nisms to monitor their implementation.

  Recommendation 3: Each region should identify which elements of their gender action plans will be  implemented within the next 36 months, establish time-bound, monitorable targets, and assign  responsibility for monitoring implementation progress. The poverty reduction and economic  'management (PREM) network, working with the regions, should ensure that institution-wide  progress is monitored.  The ongoing changes in Bank structure and processes open a window of opportunity for faster  progress in mainstreaming gender. But gender issues cut across all networks and their families, and  they must be addressed through multisectoral and multidisciplinary work.   Recommendation 4: The network councils should ensure that each network and family takes steps  to mainstream gender as appropriate in its work and, where possible, specify priority goals and  targets. The proposed PREM gender family should make promoting synergistic interactions across  the institution one of its priorities.