Can the World Bank Implement Its Vital New Gender Strategy

The World Bank recently finalized a strategy that, if successfully implemented, will have an enormous beneficial impact on economic growth and human rights across the developing and emerging markets world - World Bank Group Gender Strategy 2024 - 2030: Accelerate Gender Equality to End Poverty on a Livable Planet.

In coming years, the Bank, according to the authors of the report, will include gender equality features in scores of projects that could amount to many billions of U.S. dollars and represent the largest outlays ever dedicated to the goals, as the Bank states them: "End gender-based violence and elevate human capital, expand and enable economic opportunities, and engage women as leaders."

The new strategy is timely. The levels of inequality faced by women retards economic growth, possibly by over 20 percent, according to some studies in some countries. The World Bank notes: "Labor force participation for the working age population has been stagnant for three decades at around 53 percent for women and 80 percent for men. The largest gaps are in lower middle-income countries and, regionally, in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA, 20 percent against 75 percent) and South Asia (SAR, 30 percent against 79 percent)."

Then, declines in humanitarian aid to the poorest countries have added to the dire conditions that so many women in the poorest countries confront. The Gates Foundation's new annual report asserts: "More than half of all child deaths still occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010, the percentage of the world's poor living in the region has also increased by more than 20 percentage points. Despite this, during the same period, the share of total foreign aid to Africa has dropped from nearly 40% to only 25%-the lowest percentage in 20 years. Fewer resources mean more children will die of preventable causes."

In many countries, surveys by Transparency International suggest very high levels of abuse against women and that in countries where there are explicit laws to protect women, those laws are all too rarely enforced. Sexual corruption - where a woman seeks a service or benefit connected to the entrusted authority is conditioned on a sexual favor - is widespread, according to reports by UN agencies and civil society groups.

The challenges the Bank has set itself in releasing its new strategy are exceptionally important, yet they are bound to generate skepticism. The first goal of "ending" violence against women is aspirational - hope may spring eternal, but the Bank fails in its strategy to describe in detail how it will make substantial progress on this crucial area of basic human rights and justice.

More generally, the effective implementation of the overall strategy may well serve over time to be a major test of the Bank's own credibility. In a recent report in The Economist on economic development, Esther Duflo, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, highlighted a concerning viewpoint in noting that "We can be sure that a lot of [what the World Bank does] is useless."

That assertion may be going too far, but in recent years, the Bank has largely failed to convincingly demonstrate its effectiveness. If the gender strategy is to get any traction, then at the outset, Bank President Ajay Banga needs to publicly become its prime, forceful advocate. His World Bank annual meeting speech in late October in Washington would be an excellent opportunity.

President Banga needs to secure the widest possible buy-in from governments, other multilateral aid agencies, and bilateral aid donors for the key goals of the gender strategy. Authoritarian governments that hold power in many emerging markets and developing countries are run by men who have shown scant interest in prioritizing gender equality goals. To some degree, this might only change if there is formidable political and diplomatic pressure and far more international media attention on the gender abuses so rampant in so many countries.

Then, the Bank must go far further than ever before in seeking partners in striving to implement gender-related projects - it will need all the help it can get from religious and community-based organizations, national and international civil society organizations engaged in human rights, women's rights, social justice, and anti-corruption. The new strategy advocates for greater partnership with civil society, yet too often, the decision to make this a real priority is left to the Bank's country directors, some of whom have shown a keen interest in working with local civil society, but many have not. This needs to change.

The Bank has sought over the years to develop a range of initiatives to support civil society partnerships, but these have tended to be outside of the mainstream of the Bank's operational work. On the gender front, civil society engagement is imperative and needs to be mainstreamed in Bank operations - in many countries today, civil society activists are acutely aware of the hardships that women face in seeking rural health services, in seeking protection under the law for sexual abuse, in facing extortion when seeking many basic public services, let alone when striving for leadership positions in the private and public sectors.

If the Bank is to succeed in its bold goals, then it needs local civil society organizations in all the countries where it has projects to be at the table in designing gender-related actions, then it needs to engage in monitoring implementation, and then - this is vital - it needs to ensure that the actions are sustained over time. One approach might be for the Bank to promote multi-stakeholder country groups where its staff work alongside government officials and civil society - and where there are always women at the table having a major influence on program components. These groups could issue public reports on progress.

Corruption lurks across the landscape of gender inequality and abuse in many middle-and low-income countries. The new Bank strategy recognizes this, but is it just paying lip-service to external pressures, or will President Banga be willing - for the first time in his young tenure - to publicly recognize the issue and, using the words of one of his predecessors, James Wolfensohn at the Bank's 1997 annual meeting: "Corruption promotes the interests of the few over the many. We must fight it wherever we find it."

All views expressed by members are their own and not reflective of the views of the Bretton Woods Committee.

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