Gender equality has long been a priority for the World Bank Group and is central to its corporate commitments. We recently published an evaluation of the evolution of the Bank Group’s approach and results achieved during the past ten years, including the contribution of the 2016-2023 World Bank Group gender strategy. Our evaluation informs the implementation of the new 2024-2030 gender strategy, which builds on decades of the institution’s engagement on the gender equality agenda.

One of the most prominent features introduced by the 2016-2030 gender strategy has been the gender tag (in the Word Bank/gender flag in the International Finance Corporation): a system to mark projects that identify and address specific gender gaps along with indicators to measure progress in reducing them.

We found that the gender tag and flag served as strong incentives for the Bank Group to expand efforts toward gender equality. They raised awareness among staff and management, encouraged new sectors to prioritize gender equality, and broadened the range of gender inequalities addressed. Gender-relevant projects increased across all World Bank sectors and most IFC industries.

A need for realigned incentives and resources

However, the gender tag and flag also had unintended consequences. The strong push to tag and flag an increasing share of projects, not accompanied by adequate human and financial resources, led to a progressive lowering of the bar. So much so that, by 2023, almost all Bank projects were tagged as gender relevant, even those whose gender relevance was minimal.

The tag (to a lesser extent the flag) hides therefore a considerable heterogeneity across projects with varying degrees of gender relevance. Gender-transformative projects — those that aim to address the root causes of gender inequalities — and “light” engagements are tagged the same way. As a result, the institution is unable to systematically identify, monitor, and learn from the most impactful projects.

In the absence of a mechanism to incentivize gender-transformative projects, the tag and flag prioritized breadth over depth; that is quantity over quality. The largest expansions were in projects with low gender-relevance.  Moreover, since the gender tag and flag were defined only at design, there was weak attention to implementation and results.

IFC did not set specific flag targets for its advisory instruments until recently, which resulted in a relatively higher expansion of the most gender-relevant projects. At the same time, there remained a large share of IFC advisory projects with no gender relevance.  

These findings indicate that mandates, incentives, resources, and accountability for results need to be correctly balanced to support increasingly ambitious gender equality goals.

A stronger country-driven approach

Our evaluation also identified several promising examples of country-driven engagements, that highlight the Bank Group’s growing capacity to align lending instruments and knowledge and learning activities strategically with national gender priorities. In countries such as Bangladesh, Benin, Egypt, Mexico, and Viet Nam, gender experts and champions, supported by managers, have played a crucial role in generating and utilizing robust evidence to inform policy dialogue. This process successfully identified key gender priorities and resulted in the inclusion of gender pillars in World Bank financing operations.

While these promising practices embody the principles of an effective country-driven approach, the evaluation uncovered three key limitations in its application.

1. The approach operates project-by-project rather than strategically. To overcome the fragmentation of the portfolio, the Bank Group should identify a coherent set of instruments (projects, budget support, knowledge) that operate synergistically towards common country gender priorities.
2. There are shortcomings in operationalizing knowledge. The Bank Group produces robust gender diagnostics and knowledge, which plays a key role in identifying gender priorities in country strategies, but it is less successful in ensuring that project teams use this knowledge to design and implement strategies and interventions. To ensure that knowledge is operationalized, the Bank Group should improve knowledge dissemination, tailor knowledge to operational needs, and strengthen teams by developing their capacities and integrating dedicated gender experts.
3. Collaboration and coordination among relevant stakeholders are still sporadic and insufficient. Collaboration between the World Bank and IFC can be enhanced to capitalize on their comparative advantages, increase the focus on adaptive implementation, and strengthen partnerships with international development organizations and local stakeholders, including women’s rights organizations. More collaboration is essential not only to increase effectiveness, but also ownership and sustainability of the interventions.

An enhanced monitoring and evaluation system to track results

Finally, we found that the current model of engagement for gender equality lacks a system to capture, classify, and aggregate results consistently.

Advancing gender equality is a high-level goal that needs to be better defined and tracked at the corporate, project, and country levels based on a comprehensive theory of change and monitoring and evaluation systems at all levels. This requires more than tracking output and access indicators and a few high-level outcomes.

Capturing complex and multilayered results entails combining quantitative indicators and qualitative narratives to monitor both process-related outputs (attributable to the World Bank) and country-level outcomes the World Bank has contributed to, in collaboration with relevant stakeholders and development partners. This need for multiple monitoring and evaluation techniques has implications for the implementation of the new World Bank Group Scorecard indicators on gender equality.

The way forward

The World Bank Group’s support for gender equality has led to significant progress, expanding gender-relevant projects across sectors that previously overlooked gender issues and addressing a broader range of gender inequalities. At the same time, our evaluation highlights critical issues to be addressed and offers guidance for adopting a more strategic, outcome-focused approach. This calls for a redefinition of the Bank Group gender architecture, consisting of mobilizing gender experts to assist operational teams, defining clear roles, reporting lines, and collaboration mechanisms, and building the gender skills and knowledge of Bank Group staff on designing and implementing gender-transformative projects – all of which is essential to enable the Bank Group to meet the ambitious goals of its 2024-2030 gender strategy.