Reforming the World Bank:Will the Gender Strategy Make a Difference?

By Elaine Zuckerman, President, Gender Action
with Wu Qing, President, China Women’s Health Network
and inputs by Aida Orgocka, Jean Poe, and Hilary Sims Feldstein

Click here for the publication (pdf).

Executive Summary

There are several good reasons to promote engendering – that is ensuring gender considerations are included in – World Bank investments and other initiatives. The Bank’s own research demonstrates compellingly that greater gender equality translates into greater economic growth and less poverty worldwide. Based on this argument, the Bank’s Gender Strategy, “Integrating Gender in the World Bank’s Work: A Strategy for Action”, promotes the “business” and “poverty reduction” cases for engendering Bank investments and other initiatives. Another critical reason to engender Bank activities is the “human rights” case that women’s rights and gender equality are fundamental for achieving full and equal human rights for all. Despite external pressure by human rights advocates, the Bank overall neglects human rights issues. Another key reason to engender Bank investments is because they are often conditioned on policy reforms fraught with harmful economic, environmental and social, including gender, consequences. Since attempts to close the Bank have shown no sign of succeeding, citizens groups must pressure for Bank reform to ensure all Bank investments and policies are socially and environmentally responsible. As part of a larger Bank reform effort, Gender Action is leading citizen advocacy around making multilateral investments like those of the World Bank promote gender equal development and rights.

This Study assesses the effectiveness of the Bank’s Gender Strategy and recommends how to strengthen the Strategy. It describes how gender advocates inside the Bank have been trying to engender Bank investments and other initiatives over the last 25 years. While some progress has been made, success has been limited. In September 2001, the World Bank Board of Executive Directors endorsed the Gender Strategy that this Study analyzes. The Study examines the Gender Strategy’s strengths, weaknesses and implementation track record. This Study also analyzes the Bank Gender Operational Policy (OP) and an accompanying Bank Procedure (BP) to facilitate policy implementation that the Bank Board also endorsed in 2003.

Much of the Study focused on assessing the extent to which the Bank is implementing and meeting its strategy targets. To determine implementation effectiveness, we interviewed Bank gender experts and a few non-gender experts, and examined a sample of Bank operations and analytical work in China (the Bank’s largest borrower), as well as the Bank gender web pages.

Since creating its first “women in development” (WID) position in January 1977, the Bank has made significant progress in recognizing the necessity to reduce gender gaps. Subsequently, gender experts in the Bank have grown from 1 to some 115. In comparison, the number of Bank environmental experts grew from 1 in the early 1980s to an estimated 700-800 today. Environmental experts constitute roughly 7 percent of Bank staff and consultants compared to gender experts constituting less than 1 percent of Bank staff and consultants. While it is mandatory for Bank staff to analyze the environmental impact of every operation, there are no mandates for gender. Although environment issues are still not addressed satisfactorily, they receive much deeper attention than do gender gaps.

Moreover, a corps of 10-12 centralized gender unit staff plus regional coordinators at Bank headquarters has not expanded since the mid-1980s. The majority of the 115 “gender experts” are country-based “gender focal points”, who add gender part time to other demanding responsibilities. Both headquarters gender staff and the focal points themselves complain that the focal points either lack understanding of gender issues or time to address them or both.

The small corps of full time Bank gender experts is of high quality. Many are sophisticated conveyers of the value derived from addressing gender issues in Bank activities. They do excellent work but their ranks need to expand significantly. Also, the Bank needs complementary incentives and accountability measures for non-gender staff to promote gender equality.

The Bank Gender Strategy centerpiece is the preparation of a Country Gender Assessment (CGA) for each client country. The Strategy is premised on the assumption that CGA priority gender issues will feed into Country Assistance Strategies (CASs) and other analytical and lending instruments. But this sequence might not unfold because a consistent track record demonstrates that Bank staff heed, albeit minimally, mandatory incentives such as the environmental Safeguard Policies and ignore non-mandated policies like that on gender. Staff respond to incentives that are clearly structured to get loans approved by the Board.

Our analysis of a representative sample of Bank analytical work, operations and the CAS in our China case study of the Bank’s largest client indicate that none of these Bank products seriously address gender gaps despite the timely availability of the China Country Gender Review that is supposed to feed into CASs and operations.

Judging Bank publicity alone, one has the impression that the Strategy is known around the Bank. The Gender Director indicated that the Bank had distributed some 8,000 copies of the new Strategy during 2002. Speeches by the Bank President and publicity around gender publications like Engendering Development underline the message that gender is important and should be mainstreamed into Bank operations. Contents of B-Span, the World Bank webcasting station on development issues, frequently mainstream gender issues.

But has the message reached Bank staff?

Interviews conducted for this Study suggest that perceptions in the Bank about Gender Strategy effectiveness divide roughly into two camps. On the one hand are the gender experts who work full time promoting gender integration into Bank activities. On the other hand are the vast majority of other staff, most of whom have neither heard of the Strategy nor looked at Bank gender web pages providing tools for engendering investments and other activities. Non-gender experts said they lack the time and incentives to look at the Gender Strategy or web pages. They feel overwhelmed by the proliferating number of Bank strategies numbering around 15 and an ever-growing list of Bank priorities.

The World Bank’s mere $600,000 Incentive Fund for Gender Mainstreaming to facilitate Strategy implementation during fiscal year 2002 alone reflects the low priority gender commands among Bank priorities.

To ensure effective and consistent Gender Strategy implementation, the Strategy needs to be mandated. Although the revised Gender Operational Policy and Bank Procedure improve on the preceding policy, they replicate the unfunded non-mandated nature of the Gender Strategy. As a result, the centerpiece CGAs are likely to be of variable quality and will not be adequately reflected in investments.

Mandates and incentives to ensure that Bank staff promote gender equality and women’s rights will contribute to reforming the Bank into a socially and environmentally responsible institution that lives up to its rhetoric to reduce poverty and gender inequalities worldwide. However, the Bank can only achieve these critical goals by transforming its entire framework: It must cancel the debt contracted by undemocratic regimes and abandon economic conditions in Bank loans that impose hardships on poor people, for example, by raising health care and water user fees. Without taking these steps, not only will gaps between the rich and the poor continue to expand but poverty will continue to feminize in a world where women already constitute over 70 percent of the poor.

Click here for the publication (pdf).