In Sub-Saharan Africa, adolescent girls face a set of unique challenges. Overlapping crises such as climate change, the protracted recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, regional conflicts and global food insecurity exacerbate the inequalities faced by adolescent girls, making them particularly vulnerable in these critical times. With 60 percent of the total population of Africa under the age of 25, empowering adolescent girls is critical to accelerate economic growth and reduce intergenerational poverty.
Across Africa, agriculture is a primary sector of employment—and African women provide about 40% of the agricultural labor across the continent. Yet women farmers face systemic barriers to success, leading to large gender gaps in agricultural productivity. In the face of crises that exacerbate food insecurity, women farmers need targeted support and access to productive inputs that can secure their livelihoods and mitigate existing gender inequalities.
Women make up more than half of the total number of entrepreneurs in Africa. Yet, on average, for every dollar of profits men entrepreneurs earn, women entrepreneurs earn 66 cents. Supporting women to grow their firms would translate into higher economic growth for Sub-Saharan Africa.
Land is a key productive asset for rural households in Africa—and property rights thus play a critical role as they govern the allocation of this fundamental resource. Reflecting underlying gender inequality in the society, however, customary norms confer disproportionately weaker land rights to women, feeding into a cycle that further limits their economic opportunities.
Women’s and men’s labor market behaviors are influenced by social norms defining who should earn and control income for the family and who should perform domestic work. Individuals have incentives to conform with social norms, either as a means of achieving recognizable success or of avoiding sanctions. Changing social norms regarding women’s capability and suitability for economic activities and men’s capability and suitability for household tasks is integral to expanding women’s economic opportunities.
Women are often overrepresented among the poorest and the most vulnerable. Many either remain outside the workforce due to several factors including care responsibilities or engage in informal employment within precarious sectors lacking crucial safeguards. Even during comparatively stable times, they teeter on the edge of economic insecurity, and when confronted with shocks like a pandemic, these already precarious jobs are more susceptible to disappearance, leaving women in a vulnerable reality without adequate coping mechanisms.
This underscores the importance of putting women at the center of social protection programs, which have the potential to effectively alleviate poverty. Ensuring that social protection systems have a targeted approach for women could help them navigate through unexpected crises and setbacks, secure employment opportunities, enhance their overall productivity, agency, and well-being. And this does not only have the power to alleviate women out of poverty, but also potentially their families, communities, and broader societies.
Gender Innovation Policy Initiative for Ethiopia (GIPIE)
Despite Ethiopia’s high gross domestic product (GDP) growth and dramatic poverty reduction over the past decade, current gender gaps show that challenges remain to realizing inclusive growth and the full potential of women’s economic empowerment. In Ethiopia, women still lag men across several important economic indicators, including employment rate, agricultural productivity, earnings from self-employment, and wage income. Many of these gaps are deeply rooted in social norms and have important implications for broader poverty alleviation and growth on the national level. While the Government of Ethiopia has already made significant commitments and investments aiming to close the country’s gender gaps, to accelerate progress towards gender equality more evidence is needed to determine why these gaps persist and what we can do to solve them.
The Gender Innovation Policy Initiative for Ethiopia is working with policy makers and their development partners in Ethiopia to answer these extremely complex questions. By designing, experimenting, and evaluating possible solutions using rigorous impact evaluations, GIPIE is shedding light on the extent to which programs and policies are successfully addressing key constraints faced by women and deepening our understanding of how these challenges may hinder progress towards national development goals.
Gender gaps in the Nigerian economy are not only preventing women from reaching their full economic potential but are also costing the economy dearly. Estimates from a 2022 World Bank report indicate that gender gaps in earnings are costing the economy at least 2.3% of its GDP, but that number is a conservative estimate. Addressing gender gaps is essential—to improve both women’s wellbeing and boost the economy as a whole. To support the government of Nigeria in this endeavor, the World Bank has launched the Nigeria Gender Innovation Lab (NiGIL). NiGIL is working to generate more evidence in Nigeria on what works to empower women. NiGIL also collaborates directly with Nigerian policymakers to help equip them with cutting-edge knowledge and evidence to support their decision-making and policy design.
Nigerian policymakers have already shown a strong commitment to this agenda. With more evidence on what works, Nigeria can make immense progress in empowering millions of women, lifting them and their households out of poverty.
Expanding access to childcare services in Sub-Saharan Africa holds significant promise not only for promoting child development but also for advancing women's economic engagement and productivity, thereby driving economic growth. In Sub-Saharan Africa and globally, women disproportionately shoulder the burden of unpaid care work, compared to men, and are predominantly the primary caregivers for children. This imbalance in unpaid care responsibilities holds back women's economic participation and productivity. The lack of access to quality childcare services is particularly acute among the poorest and most vulnerable households. Recent rigorous evidence from low- and middle-income countries demonstrates that the availability of childcare positively influences female labor force participation, with some studies also highlighting gains in productivity, income, and job quality. Concurrently, a robust body of evidence underscores that investments in early childhood development yield substantial benefits for children's school readiness, lifelong learning outcomes, and future employment and earnings. By positively impacting both mothers and children, childcare provision can play a crucial role in reducing poverty and stimulating economic growth.
The Measures for Advancing Gender Equality (MAGNET) initiative—a collaboration between the GIL and LSMS teams at the World Bank, IFPRI, IRC, Oxford University, and the Brookings Institution—continued to develop and validate over twenty novel tools for measuring control over assets, goal setting and decision-making, and sense of control and efficacy. Since its official launch, MAGNET has completed data collection of its tools 38 times across 12 different countries, including Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, DRC, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. In the last fiscal year, MAGNET also disseminated preliminary results through a seminar with global data stakeholders, policymakers, and researchers in November 2022. MAGNET also held multiple bilateral meetings with key actors to optimize research uptake and prepare for the eventual submission of their validated measurement tools to key large-scale surveys.
Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the largest gender gaps in mobile internet usage globally, with over 190 million women not using these services, representing a 37% gender gap. Major obstacles to women's access and use of digital technologies include the high cost of devices and data plans (and women's lower financial capacity to afford digital access), low female literacy (including digital literacy), ID requirements, risk of online abuse, and a lack of content and services tailored to women. Bridging the gender digital divide is crucial for several reasons. Digital skills and tools are increasingly necessary for accessing services like health, education, social protection, and financial services. Furthermore, digital technologies are key to job creation on a continent with a growing workforce; an estimated 230 million jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa will require digital skills by 2030. To remain competitive in the digital economy, countries must prioritize education and develop their workforce's digital skills, particularly for women, whose employment is vital for economic growth, personal agency, and improved health, education, and economic outcomes.
In addition to the “glass ceiling” that obstructs women's rise to leadership roles, women also encounter “glass walls” that hinder their entry into more profitable, traditionally male-dominated sectors (MDS). Unconscious biases, societal norms, limited exposure to these sectors, and constraints on time and capital are among the numerous factors that deter women from pursuing opportunities in male-dominated fields. These limitations that confine women to a narrow range of occupations based on their gender curtail the growth potential of female wage workers, entrepreneurs, and farmers, stymying the broader economy. The potential gains from breaking down these barriers are immense: Macroeconomic research highlights that over the past 50 years, the increased participation of women and other marginalized groups in highly skilled professions in the United States has contributed to a 20–40 percent rise in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (Hsieh and Klenow 2016; Hsieh et al. 2019). Eliminating gendered occupational segregation entirely could yield an additional 10 percent increase in GDP today (Hsieh et al. 2019).
Socio-emotional skills are crucial in determining labor market outcomes, including earnings and job types. Consequently, socio-emotional skills training has emerged as a promising strategy to enhance labor market outcomes and potentially narrow existing gender gaps. However, the specific skills that are most critical for women's economic empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa remain largely unidentified since the labor market structures and social norms in the region differ significantly from those in Western countries, where much of the existing research on socio-emotional skills has been conducted. Recent Africa Gender Innovation Lab research seeks to fill these knowledge gaps and support the success of these programs, which hinges on identifying which skills are most critical for women and men and how these needs vary by context.
In partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), Africa GIL is working to unpack socio-emotional skills (SES) by examining which skills are most critical for women’s and men’s economic empowerment. This initiative aims to develop free SES measurement tools and explore the relationship between SES and social norms. Visit the Effective Socio-emotional Skills to Gain Economic Empowerment (ESTEEM) website to learn more about this work.
Promoting women's socioeconomic empowerment involves expanding their control over resources and decisions critical to their well-being. Engaging men in these efforts is crucial, as they often hold significant power and influence within households and communities. Additionally, increasing men's participation in unpaid household and care work is vital for expanding women's economic opportunities. Over the past two decades, practitioners and researchers have explored methods to involve men in preventing gender-based violence and promoting sexual and reproductive health. More recently, there has been a growing focus on involving men in women's economic empowerment initiatives. This approach acknowledges the persistent gender inequality in resource control and aims to protect women from potential backlash resulting from their improved socioeconomic status.
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