AFRICA THE GIL PORTFOLIO INCLUDES GENDER 76 in 29 INNOVATION impact African evaluations countries LAB 37% of evaluations 63% of evaluations INFLUENCE are of external are of World projects Bank projects (28 impact (48 impact evaluations) evaluations) The World Bank’s Africa Gender GIL INFLUENCE SCORECARD Innovation Lab (GIL) conducts impact evaluations of development $2.17 GIL’s Direct Influence interventions and leads policy billion The monetary value research to generate evidence of the specific project component(s) on how to close gender gaps in that GIL influenced earnings, productivity, assets, and agency. With these findings, GIL equips project teams and policymakers to design innovative $1 spent/ Value for Money and scalable interventions to $94 directly The value of project dollars GIL address gender inequality. influenced influenced for every dollar we spent $4.57 Total Value of Operations That billion GIL has Influenced December 2018 EXAMPLES OF GIL’S $2.17 BILLION IN INFLUENCE ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS GIL INFLUENCES PROJECTS IN THREE WAYS* Results from GIL influences a Project teams a GIL impact project’s design copy a GIL evaluation or by introducing an innovation policy research innovative approach currently study influence through the process being tested the design of a of doing an impact on another project (74%) evaluation (24%) project (4.5%) *The percentages reflect GIL influence within that category by value of interventions influenced. The total count exceeds 100% as a few projects have been influenced in more than one way. Establishing Partnerships in Nine repay a loan, is now being scaled up in Zimbabwe Countries to Scale up Training and Madagascar, with more to follow in Nigeria, for Women Entrepreneurs Zambia, and Côte d’Ivoire. In the absence of collateral, and with limited information available GIL helped scale up a successful personal on the creditworthiness of women borrowers, initiative training program in nine countries— psychometric testing is a promising solution. including Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Customers who scored at a high threshold on the Jamaica, and Nicaragua—after showing that it test were seven times more likely to repay their resulted in a 40% increase in profits for female loans compared to lower-performing customers. entrepreneurs in Togo, compared to those who followed a traditional business training. GIL initially influenced the World Bank Togo Influencing Land Rights Programs Private Sector Development Support Project for Nation-wide Impact to add the personal initiative training, enabling GIL provided advice for the design of a pilot the collection of key evidence on the training’s that became one of the first initiatives in Africa impact. GIL has also worked with partners to to address tenure security on a national level. adapt this curriculum for women farmers and is One of the factors contributing to women’s now testing its effectiveness in Mozambique. lower productivity as farmers is their weaker access to and ownership of land, which Introducing Innovative Psychometric reduces their incentives to make productive Tests to Ease Women’s Access investments. Responding to this constraint, to Larger Business Loans GIL partnered with the Government of Rwanda to evaluate the pilot of Rwanda’s Land GIL and the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness, Tenure Regularization program. GIL evidence and Innovation (FCI) Global Practice developed a uncovered a 19-percentage point increase in the pilot on psychometric testing as an alternative to likelihood of women making soil conservation traditional collateral in Ethiopia. This innovation, investments—twice the increase seen for men. a psychometric screening tool that predicts the With this evidence in hand, the pilot was scaled likelihood that an entrepreneur will be able to up nationally. Scaling Evidence to Empower the impacts of a vocational and life skills training Adolescent Girls and Young program through ‘safe space’ clubs for adolescent Women Across Two Continents girls. Findings showed that the clubs raised the likelihood of girls engaging in income-generating GIL evidence helped shape two projects that activities by 72% and decreased teen pregnancy will reach 700,000 girls and women across by 26%. At a cost of under $100 US per girl per India and six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa year, the program not only worked but was also over five years. The design of the Sahel Women cost-effective. In Liberia, GIL found that the Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Economic Empowerment of Adolescent Girls and Regional Project (SWEDD) and the India Tejaswini Young Women (EPAG) program, which provided Socioeconomic Empowerment of Adolescent six months of classroom-based technical and life Girls & Young Women project were influenced skills training, followed by six months of follow- by GIL findings from Uganda and Liberia. In up support, led to a 50% increase in employment Uganda, GIL worked with BRAC to document among trainees. “PRICELESS INFLUENCE”: FOR SOME INSTANCES OF GIL INFLUENCE, WE CANNOT ASSIGN A MONETARY VALUE Examples include changing government policy, scaling down ineffective interventions, improving the ways companies work, and shaping World Bank Group policy. Leveraging Evidence on Firm result of the intervention, take-up of business Formalization to Change registration was extremely high for both men- Government Policy and women-owned firms, with about 75 percent of those offered assistance obtaining a business GIL’s analysis of firm informality in Malawi registration certificate. The study findings on influenced the Government’s policy discussion the importance of combining support for on the turnover threshold for firm registration. business registration with other complementary GIL developed an effective and replicable interventions, such as linking with commercial design—at a much lower cost than the typical banks, was additionally integrated by the World private sector development intervention—to Bank’s Investment Climate teams as a core part offer informal firms support to formalize. As a of their business operations. GIL findings have influenced over 100 projects in 29 countries throughout Africa, but our reach is global. For instance, we helped shape a personal initiative training program across five states in Mexico, a World Bank project on adolescent girls in India which will reach 400,000 beneficiaries, and a women’s entrepreneurship development program in Indonesia. Scaling Down Ineffective country diagnostics and advise on country Matching Grant Programs program planning. For instance, GIL’s inputs led to substantial coverage of gender gaps Fewer matching grants programs on business in employment, agricultural productivity, and development services are in existence compared education in the Zambia Systematic Country to a few years ago after a paper co-written by Diagnostic (SCD). In Niger, GIL’s involvement GIL highlighted important issues with the design in the SCD contributed to the strong focus on and implementation of these types of programs. fertility and demographics, and to the inclusion of a highlight on the agricultural productivity gap, drawing on GIL’s Levelling the Field report. Changing the Way Banks Work to Alleviate Barriers to Saving SHIFTING THE AGENDA AT A REGIONAL LEVEL GIL helped a private bank in Ghana design and GIL brings together a body of evidence on a particular launch new product lines aimed at helping women issue to help change the policy conversation at a overcome barriers to saving. A number of these regional level. GIL’s first synthesis report, Levelling innovations were subsequently adopted by one of the Field, was launched in partnership with the the largest banks in the Ghanaian market. Product ONE Campaign in 2014. This report measured features included automated savings deposits, the gender gap in agricultural productivity in self-imposed liquidity constraints on saved funds, six countries, provided detailed analyses of the deposit collection, and savings accounts linked to factors that account for the gap, and sets a list mobile money. of policy priorities to address these gaps and improve opportunities for women farmers in Africa. Over thirty news sources from around the Influencing World Bank Group Policy world published articles about the report and it has been cited in writings by Kofi Annan, Melinda GLOBAL UPTAKE OF THE GIL MODEL Gates, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The Levelling the The success of the Africa Region Gender Field report has also influenced World Bank policy Innovation Lab has inspired the creation of Gender priorities, with multiple strategy documents and Innovation Labs in other regions of the World flagship reports drawing on its findings, such Bank, namely East Asia and Pacific, Latin America as the WBG Gender Strategy (2015) the Africa and Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, Region Gender Action Plan (2018), the World and South Asia. By the end of 2017, more than 100 Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends and Impact Evaluations had been launched in close to Enabling the Business of Agriculture 2017. At the 40 countries across these Labs. national level, the report influenced the design of strategic diagnostics and strategy documents of several countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda, INFLUENCING COUNTRY-LEVEL STRATEGIES Mozambique, Niger, and Madagascar. It has GIL has partnered with World Bank teams in additionally influenced the design of projects over 10 African countries to draft strategic across the African continent. This work has been funded in part by the Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality (UFGE), which is a multi-donor trust fund administered by the World Bank to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment through experimentation and knowledge creation to help governments and the private sector focus policy and programs on scalable solutions with sustainable outcomes. The UFGE is supported with generous contributions For more information, visit the from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Gender Innovation Lab’s website: Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and www.worldbank.org/africa/gil the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.