The World Bank Group has been striving to transform the lives of many women and girls, as it supports countries moving towards greater gender equality. In many cases projects have aimed at narrowing gender gaps, reaching out to more and more women and girls and improving their access to resources and services. A few projects, however, go further. Not only do they aim at closing specific gender inequalities but also at changing the conditions that perpetuate those inequalities. This involves transforming gender norms, roles, and relations, in addition to redistributing power, resources, and services more equitably.  

For instance, in pursuing women’s economic empowerment, a gender-transformative intervention would focus not only on promoting access to credit and skills development opportunities but also on supporting women and girls in using and controlling these resources.  

Gender-transformative projects remain a minority compared to the Bank Group overall efforts to promote gender equality—and it may not be realistic to expect that every project can produce gender-transformative results. The issue is, however, that the Bank Group results measurement system does not systematically identify (and incentivize) these high-impact interventions, which diminishes the potential for learning, replicating and scaling them up.   

In an earlier blog we provided a brief overview of the Independent Evaluation Group’s (IEG) evaluation of a decade’s worth of World Bank Group engagement for gender equality. Here we want to delve into how the Bank Group measures and reports gender equality results and how, thanks to this, it can learn from experience, course-correct when necessary, and replicate and scale gender-transformative interventions. Better measurement can support the Bank Group’s new 2024-2030 gender strategy to achieve gender results at scale.  

How Does the World Bank Group Report on Gender Results?  

The Bank Group relies on a system of gender tags (for the Bank) and flags (for the International Finance Corporation—IFC) to report on gender equality results at the corporate level. These tags and flags mark projects that, at design, clearly articulate how they will address specific gender inequalities. This system has brought both notable benefits and some unintended consequences.  

On the positive side, the gender tag and flag have raised awareness about the importance of addressing gender inequalities and the potential of projects to reduce them. They have expanded efforts toward gender equality, with new sectors joining in, and broadened the range of gender inequalities addressed. However, over time, the criteria for assigning gender tags and flags became more lenient, encouraging breadth over depth. Now, almost 100% of World Bank projects are tagged, and the number of IFC flagged advisory projects and investments is growing rapidly.  

Challenges and Implications  

One unintended consequence is that interventions with high potential for impact do not stand out. When nearly every project is tagged or flagged, it is almost impossible to systematically recognize the truly impactful projects among the forest of tags and flags. Gender-transformative projects and “light” engagements are tagged in the same way, making it difficult to systematically identify, monitor, and learn from the most promising interventions.  

The tag/flag system also does not support strong implementation, which is essential for results. Since tags and flags are assigned at the project design stage and not subsequently followed up, staff are incentivized to produce a gender-relevant design, but not necessarily ensuring effective implementation. This limits the ability to secure adequate budgets, access to gender experts, and accountability mechanisms for tracking and learning from results.  

Measuring Project-Level Results  

When we move from the corporate to the intervention level, measuring results entails a different set of challenges. Projects often collect sex-disaggregated data, which however measures mostly outreach, access to services and resources, or inclusion in the project—not outcomes (for instance, whether women receive more income and can control it, whether they have a voice in decision-making, whether the incidence of gender-based violence has decreased). In some cases, gender-transformative results exist and remain undocumented. In 2011, the World Bank began supporting Peru’s ALEGRA (Asistencia Legal Gratuita) centers as part of broader efforts to modernize justice services. Through ALEGRA, vulnerable women—including survivors of gender-based violence—received legal support and were empowered to assert their rights and seek justice. Many women experienced an increased sense of psychosocial well-being, protection, and agency. This project delivered transformative results, but these outcomes were not captured in the Bank Group’s monitoring and reporting systems. They only emerged through interviews conducted by IEG with project beneficiaries and ALEGRA center staff when conducting the evaluation.  

Challenges and Implications  

Why do Bank Group projects rarely track gender-transformative results?  To start with, there is a lack of consensus on what success entails. There is not a common understanding of what the key gender-transformative elements are and how they operate, or which indicators can effectively measure this change.  

There is also a tendency to formulate the project objectives—and measure results achieved—in terms of what can be directly attributed to the Bank Group. Rarely do projects track progress towards deeper, more meaningful results achieved through contributions to joint efforts with countries and development partners and over a longer time horizon. M&E frameworks tend instead to over-rely on output indicators, such as the number of women provided access to training or credit, rather than reporting on outcome indicators, such as increased revenue or profit of women entrepreneurs. 

Country-Level Frameworks 

Achieving gender equality is fundamentally an ambitious goal that requires more than just a project. Only a country-driven strategic approach—as the new Bank Group’s 2024-2030 gender strategy recognizes—is conducive to impactful outcomes. This is because this type of results emerges when the causes of gender inequalities are identified and addressed at the country level. This allows the Bank Group to take a strategic approach and prioritize the specific gender inequalities that are holding women and girls back in each context, and define its contributions based on its comparative advantage in the local environment. 

The country engagement model provides a structured approach for defining a trajectory of change, around which all relevant actors—including women's organizations and civil society—can come together around shared gender equality goals. Country-level results frameworks should capture outcomes relative to the short-, medium- and long-run. Strengthening this model in practice would represent a significant step toward meeting the ambitious goals of the Bank Group’s 2024-2030 gender strategy.