As International Women’s Day approaches, let’s remember that gender equality makes good economic sense
- While progress has been made on removing discriminatory laws, closing gender gaps, broadening women’s access to finance and stepping up efforts to prevent gender-based violence, much remains to be done
Research from the World Bank and others shows that unleashing the economic power of women can contribute to global growth. Moreover, it is the right thing to do. Fortunately, more countries recognise that economies can reach their full potential only with the full participation of both women and men.
Gender-focused policies and programmes can further enable girls and women to realise their economic potential. These include targeted investments aimed at encouraging girls to stay in school longer, so that they are empowered with the education and skills they need to participate in the labour force as adults.
With World Bank support, for example, the Bangladeshi government provides girls with secondary-school educational stipends and has introduced a life-skills curriculum. These measures have reversed the gender gap in secondary education, so that girls now outnumber boys in the classroom.
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In Lebanon, the World Bank aims to help increase women’s use of public transport by supporting efforts to revamp the transport sector with their needs in mind.
The Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), based at the World Bank, is designed to address this funding shortage and help remove other barriers women entrepreneurs face.
Backed by the governments of the US, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, among others, the scheme aims to support 115,000 women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises in over 50 countries and to mobilise more than US$2.6 billion in private and public-sector funding.
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Leveraging technology, including by shifting more cash transactions to digital channels, can give women greater control over their own resources.
Such innovations can deliver other benefits, too: a 2016 study in Kenya found that providing women with access to mobile money services increased household savings by more than one-fifth and helped to reduce extreme poverty among women-headed households by 22 per cent.
The private sector has been leading the way in bringing digital financial services into the mainstream. In Egypt, financial services provider Fawry, an IFC client, enables more than 2.5 million transactions per day and recently launched the country’s first female e-payment agent network, with the aim of increasing women’s access to e-payments.
But, in addition to discriminatory laws and lack of access to capital and assets, girls and women in many parts of the world are also shackled by norms that suggest a girl is of less value than a boy.
The good news is that countries are making progress in preventing and responding to gender-based violence. Work funded by the World Bank and the Sexual Violence Research Initiative in the Solomon Islands, for instance, shows that such violence is no longer accepted once communities, supported by faith leaders and government service providers, speak out against it.
And, as best practices emerge regarding how to help survivors of violence, practitioners must join forces to share the lessons learned. Providing women’s networks with social support, violence risk training and confidence-building programmes can also help.
As International Women’s Day approaches, I would like to re-emphasise that the World Bank Group stands ready to join forces with all stakeholders working to empower women and unleash their economic potential.
David Malpass is president of the World Bank Group. Copyright: Project Syndicate
