The World Bank Group’s commitment to support gender equality has been a priority for many years. Gender has been an International Development Association special theme since 2010 and has been reflected in other corporate commitments. This evaluation assesses the evolution of World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC) engagement on the gender equality agenda between fiscal year (FY)12 and FY23 and the results achieved. The World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development (World Bank 2012) is the starting point of the evaluation period and provides the conceptual framework to assess and interpret the results achieved in advancing gender equality. The evaluation also analyzes the factors that have enabled and constrained this evolution, including the contribution of the Bank Group’s FY16–23 gender strategy. In July 2024, the Bank Group launched the 2024–30 gender strategy, with the ambitious goal of “accelerat[ing] gender equality to end poverty on a livable planet” (World Bank Group 2024, 8). This evaluation provides lessons and recommendations to inform the implementation of the new strategy.

More Progress in Breadth Than Depth

In the past decade, the share of gender-relevant projects increased in all World Bank sectors and in most IFC industries. The World Bank and IFC engagement for financing gender equality expanded beginning in 2012 and especially after the adoption of the FY16–23 gender strategy. The share of gender-relevant projects increased based on a measure of “gender relevance intensity” developed by this evaluation. The percentage of projects that scored higher than 15 (up to 100)—considered “gender relevant”—increased in the World Bank from 44 percent in 2012 to 93 percent in 2023, whereas the percentage of projects that scored higher than 25 increased from 13 percent to 39 percent. The International Development Association played an important role in supporting gender-relevant projects. The share of gender-relevant projects among the International Development Association projects was systematically higher than among the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development projects throughout the evaluation period. Thus, more projects’ designs accounted for the existence of gender inequalities, promoted better inclusion of women and girls, added activities to address their needs, adopted measures to address gender inequalities, and used indicators to measure gender-related outputs or outcomes. This increase happened in all World Bank sectors and in some IFC industries.

The expansion of gender-relevant projects, however, was greater in quantity than quality. The least gender-relevant projects increased the most, whereas the most gender-relevant projects did not see a significant increase—that is, projects with a 20–25 gender intensity score increased from 5 percent to 27 percent, and projects with a score higher than 55 increased only from 2 percent to 3 percent. This group of projects includes gender stand-alone projects and projects with major gender components. Manual reviews of project portfolios also indicate that relatively few projects had gender-transformative elements, sufficient attention to context-specific conditions and intersectionality, and robust theories of changes—and this group increased very little. For IFC advisory services, the trend was different. The share of the most gender-relevant projects grew exponentially—that is, those scoring higher than 55 increased from 2 percent to 23 percent. At the same time, more than one-third of projects still were not gender relevant (had a score equal to zero) at the end of the evaluation period, and the percentage of projects scoring higher than 25 remained the same at 40 percent. In IFC investments, the increase was more modest, and the least gender-relevant projects increased the most.

The World Bank gender tag and IFC gender flag contributed to enhancing gender engagement. The gender tag and the gender flag generated awareness among staff and management on the importance of addressing gender inequalities and the potential of operations to reduce them. They also represented a powerful incentive for operational and country teams, contributing to a significant expansion in the number of projects addressing gender inequalities. This increased share of gender-relevant projects is a positive development and is a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for progress toward gender equality.

The gender tag and the gender flag incentivized breadth over depth, however, and design over implementation. The increasingly ambitious targets were unrealistic with respect to the resources available to operational teams to adequately address gender inequalities in their projects. As a result, the gender tag, which corresponded to a not-so-stringent level of gender relevance intensity when it was introduced, became increasingly more generous over time and incentivized a disproportionate expansion of projects with low gender relevance. At the end of the evaluation period, almost all World Bank projects were gender tagged, which corresponded to a gender intensity threshold of just above zero. The minimum quality standard increased overall but at a cost—the nonselective gender mainstreaming that the FY16–23 gender strategy meant to overcome was reestablished for the World Bank by the end of the evaluation period, and the gender tag did not identify and did not incentivize projects with high gender relevance. IFC gender flag targets have been recently increased but have not been set as high as World Bank gender tag targets. If the pressure to flag IFC projects increases too quickly relative to the resources allocated, IFC risks abandoning a more focused approach to gender equality.

Challenge of Managing for Results at the Country Level

The Bank Group has made progress in adopting a country-driven approach to its engagement for gender equality, but it has not successfully operationalized this approach yet. The FY16–23 gender strategy highlights that a country-driven approach is essential to reduce gender inequalities. However, the approach to gender equality remains fragmented, with various instruments, sectors, and institutions disconnected at the country level and gender inequalities still being addressed on an individual project basis. The 2024–30 gender strategy commits the Bank Group to approach gender equality more coherently and strategically in its country engagement.

Most country strategies identify relevant gender priorities that align well with country needs, but few propose or implement integrated operational strategies to address them. First, the quality of gender diagnostics from Systematic Country Diagnostics and Country Partnership Frameworks (CPFs) has improved since 2015, when a generic approach to gender as a cross-cutting issue was prevalent. Strong analytics have supported the identification of gender priorities that correspond to country needs expressed by country gender statistics. Second, the approach to gender equality is still not strategic enough, with insufficient prioritization of which projects and activities can best address the gender inequalities identified in the CPF, based on the World Bank and IFC comparative advantages and the opportunities for collaboration and coordination with relevant stakeholders. Third, the approach is fragmented—the various instruments, sectors, and institutions are not coordinated or synergistic toward common outcomes, even though individually they often align with the gender priorities identified in the CPF. The result is often scattered interventions, each pursuing gender goals individually without a unified country program for gender equality bringing them together. Finally, there is limited evidence of the One World Bank Group approach1 for gender equality—collaboration between the World Bank and IFC is opportunistic and limited to specific activities.

Inadequate attention to implementation is hindering the achievement of gender equality results. First, the quality of implementation is closely related to the availability of gender skills, financial resources, and accountability. There are few dedicated gender experts to support operational teams during implementation, weak capacity and limited accountability of project teams and implementing partners, and insufficient budget for the implementation of gender-related activities. Second, most support for the integration of a gender equality perspective in projects is used at design, mostly for assigning gender tags and gender flags. Corporate incentives are directed to produce a gender-relevant design rather than to ensure effective implementation. The key ingredients to successful implementation are investment in context-specific gender analytic work, strong engagement with local stakeholders to adapt the intervention to the local context and foster its local ownership, and availability of gender expertise for implementation. The evaluation finds cases of poorly designed projects that achieved results because of investment in gender expertise and the adoption of effective approaches during implementation and, conversely, cases of well-designed projects that lost effectiveness because of shortcomings in implementation.

Resources and incentives are not aligned to support country engagement and partner coordination for gender equality. First, the existing incentives, such as gender tags and gender flags, are directed toward individual projects but not at the level of country engagement. Second, and similarly, gender expertise is mostly allocated to support individual projects but not the country engagement. Moreover, gender experts are rarely posted to country offices or recruited locally, and Country Management Units are not adequately supported to operationalize the country-driven approach. Countries that show some progress in country-driven engagement have country gender platforms (often financed by trust funds) or similar mechanisms of support, gender experts, or gender champions sustained by committed country directors and managers. Third, Bank Group coordination and collaboration with key stakeholders in the country are limited and irregular. This includes engagement with development partners, civil society organizations, local governments, and local stakeholders, including women’s rights organizations and target groups. IFC engages with industries and private sector clients, but engagement with other key development partners has been less common. The limited engagement has resulted in diminished relevance, efficacy, and sustainability of Bank Group interventions.

Using Knowledge to Advance Gender Equality

Globally, the Bank Group’s knowledge engagements have increased understanding of the multiple drivers of gender inequality and improved data and indicators on gender inequality. The World Development Report 2012 highlighted the need for an integrated approach to gender equality, including the interconnections among formal and informal institutions, access to and control over resources, and women’s and girls’ agency. The Bank Group’s analytic work has been exploring these interlinks, and this framework remains relevant today. The Bank Group’s contribution to data on gender equality includes gender data in World Development Indicators and annual publications, such as Women, Business and the Law. These global reports can catalyze reforms at the country level—for example, the Women, Business and the Law 2016: Getting to Equal report was used to spur policy reforms in the Arab Republic of Egypt that removed hour and sector restrictions on women’s participation in economic activities (World Bank 2015).

The Bank Group provides analytic work to examine gender inequalities, inform country strategies and policy dialogue, and support interventions. The World Bank and IFC have produced robust gender diagnostics that have played a critical role in supporting the identification of gender priorities in CPFs, informing the integration of policy actions in development policy operations, and feeding into the policy dialogue on gender equality.2 Half the CPFs analyzed for this evaluation explicitly include gender issues in their objectives, and in almost all, the prioritization of gender equality is based on the Systematic Country Diagnostic’s sex-disaggregated data and gender analysis or other analytic products. IFC has been increasing its global and country knowledge products and building a solid case for the private sector to address gender inequalities successfully, including in new areas such as housing finance, insurance, leadership, time use, gender-based violence (GBV), ride-sharing, and digital platforms.

The Bank Group has been less successful in operationalizing the knowledge it produces. Country diagnostics often do not identify intervention strategies for country strategies or specific operations. Only one-fourth of CPFs draw on evidence of “what works” to address gender inequalities and develop policy actions. As for operations, only 27 percent of World Bank stand-alone projects have explicitly used knowledge to inform the relevance and effectiveness of the theory of change, and only 16 percent have conducted and used assessments, studies, surveys, or data to inform implementation. Although IFC knowledge has increased, IFC has been less successful in using this knowledge to design operations tailored to sectoral and local contexts. Reasons for this ineffectiveness include inadequate internal and external dissemination, difficulties in tailoring knowledge to operational needs, lack of capacities in project teams and implementing partners, and shortages of dedicated gender experts with sector- and context-specific expertise to facilitate knowledge uptake by operational teams.

The World Bank pilots and evaluates effective solutions to address gender inequalities through Gender Innovation Labs (GILs). An outcome of the FY16–23 gender strategy is the expansion of GILs in all Regions, which pilot and evaluate interventions to improve gender equality. GILs are increasingly supporting operational teams to better understand and apply what works using a broader range of methods beyond impact evaluations. This effort could enhance the operationalization of knowledge and strengthen the country-driven approach. However, this evolution of GILs is still embryonic in most Regions and is not adequately funded with internal resources. Moreover, there are no systematic mechanisms of coordination among GILs, gender platforms or similar mechanisms of support, and gender experts in Global Practices.

Limitations of Monitoring and Evaluation Systems

At the corporate level, the Bank Group does not have a method to classify and aggregate results to measure the impact of its engagement for gender equality. There are two issues. First, Bank Group results are not explicitly defined—the FY16–23 gender strategy defined high-level outcomes, but there is no consensus on how to operationalize these results (that is, how to interpret, measure, and report them) and what success would look like. Staff and management variously define results as more and better processes, improved project designs, increase in gender-tagged and gender-flagged projects, specific outputs achieved by projects, and decrease in country gender inequalities. Second, the Bank Group does not offer guidelines regarding which type of results is important to track and achieve (for example, which outcomes projects should contribute to and where, and which quality of results projects should ensure—whether it be gender transformative, sustainable, scalable, institutionalized, or owned by countries). The lack of explicit definitions and systematic measurement of results makes it difficult for this evaluation to draw strong, generalizable conclusions on the impact of the Bank Group’s gender engagement.

At the country level, indicators are poorly used to measure results and are inconsistently used in reporting. Indicators of CPFs, development policy operations, and other instruments often measure project outreach or women’s and girls’ access to services, less frequently measure changes in women’s and girls’ empowerment, and even less frequently measure the Bank Group’s contribution to reducing gender inequalities. Missing baselines and arbitrary targets also make it difficult to interpret project achievements. Improvements in reporting will require the Bank Group to relent on seeking to measure attribution (which leads to concentrating on measuring outputs or intermediate indicators) and focus more on assessing its contribution to gender equality within the framework of a country-specific theory of change.

Challenge of Achieving Gender-Transformative Results

Most projects do not sufficiently address the multiple constraints on achieving gender equality, which undermines their effectiveness. Recent gender stand-alone projects rely on multisectoral and holistic designs to address the root causes of gender inequalities and produce gender-transformative results. The World Bank’s Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend project and IFC’s Pacific Women in Business Program in Papua New Guinea and the Waka Mere peer learning platform in the Solomon Islands exemplify this comprehensive approach, despite challenges in implementation. However, these projects are exceptions. Most projects and country programs analyzed in the case studies do not adequately consider the interconnections and complementarities among the three dimensions of the theory of change for gender equality—access to and control of resources, conducive formal and informal institutions, and women’s and girls’ agency—which has hindered the achievement of gender equality results.

World Bank and IFC interventions focus more on access to resources than control of resources and often overlook the influence of gender norms and gender power relations. Facilitating women’s control over resources by promoting asset ownership requires addressing gender power relations and norms that can constrain the achievement of this goal. For example, the World Bank supported land titling, including joint land titling, and women’s access to credit for housing or productive assets, with mixed results. World Bank and IFC projects frequently target women and girls as individuals, overlooking the gender power relations and norms in the households, communities, and social networks in which they are “embedded” that strongly influence their choices and empowerment opportunities. Ignoring gender power relations can have negative consequences, such as inadvertently increasing GBV. Recently, the World Bank and IFC have been increasing their engagement with men and boys to advance gender equality (which can be an effective approach when it is part of holistic and long-term interventions).

The Bank Group increasingly recognizes GBV (which results from gender inequality) as a barrier to achieving gender equality. For this reason, the World Bank and IFC have progressively increased their engagement on GBV by both mitigating GBV risk in projects through safeguard policies and addressing GBV to advance gender equality and women’s and girls’ empowerment in countries and industries. During the evaluation period, the number of sectors and the number of investment project financing, development policy operations, and advisory services and analytics that address GBV increased. The evaluation identifies health and transport interventions (for example, in Bangladesh and Peru) as providing opportunities to address GBV through comprehensive approaches aimed at strengthening prevention and response systems while expanding survivors’ access to healing and recovery services. IFC has been increasingly focusing on addressing GBV in the workplace to enhance the environment of workers in client companies and industries.

The evaluation finds that World Bank and IFC engagement for gender equality is more effective when it addresses context-specific binding constraints, seizes existing opportunities, and considers women’s and girls’ aspirations. Setting quotas or targets of female beneficiaries in projects can be effective only when the project also addresses women’s and girls’ specific needs and removes constraints to allow their full participation and empowerment. The World Bank and IFC are more effective when they establish productive collaborations with partners embedded in the country based on each other’s comparative advantage, or when they support gender champions as role models, as IFC did in Mexico’s and Viet Nam’s peer learning platforms for promoting childcare and addressing GBV. Evidence presented in the literature suggests that projects can successfully contribute to women’s and girls’ empowerment when the projects give them voice to express their aspirations, expand their aspirations, and ensure that these aspirations are fulfilled.

The evaluation does not find many examples of achieving gender results at scale. The FY16–23 gender strategy aimed to identify successful “gender-smart solutions” (effective solutions to reduce gender inequalities) to replicate and expand. The new strategy also aims to assist countries in delivering outcomes at scale. The evaluation finds examples of sectoral programs of long duration that contributed to large-scale gender equality results but that struggled to produce sustainable results because of a lack of domestic resource mobilization and the weak capacities of partners. Projects can successfully scale up gender results when they feed into countrywide sector reforms, invest in institution strengthening of existing services, and support a long-term gender engagement, such as the justice reform project in Peru. Otherwise, gender-transformative projects, based on a comprehensive theory of change, struggle to go to scale and often do not have a strategy to do so.

Sustainability is enabled by supporting endogenous processes of change. When the World Bank and IFC foster bottom-up and culturally sensitive approaches that support endogenous processes of change, they are more likely to achieve sustainable gender outcomes owned by communities and local stakeholders.

Findings and Recommendations

This evaluation finds that the Bank Group needs to rethink how it operationalizes its approach to realize its ambition in the 2024–30 gender strategy. The challenges presented in this report have been found in other Independent Evaluation Group evaluations, such as World Bank Group Gender Strategy Mid-Term Review: An Assessment by the Independent Evaluation Group (World Bank 2021b) and Addressing Gender Inequalities in Countries Affected by Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: An Evaluation of the World Bank Group’s Support (World Bank 2023a). These challenges suggest that a new approach for strategic and outcome-oriented engagement is needed and requires the following:

• Enhancing strategic country engagement. Country engagement for gender equality can become more systematic and strategic. This will require country gender analytics that go beyond identifying gender priorities to provide insights into how to best achieve change in the country context; more effective prioritization of activities and expected results in CPFs based on a deep understanding of local opportunities and constraints on achieving gender equality with respect to access to and control of resources, formal and informal institutions, and women’s and girls’ agency; better leveraging of World Bank and IFC collaboration and comparative advantage; an increased focus on adaptive implementation; and stronger collaboration with international development partners and local stakeholders, including women’s rights organizations.
• Focusing on outcomes. 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 these 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.
• Realigning incentives, resources, and structures. The incentives and resources devoted to supporting gender equality do not match the level of ambition of the Bank Group. Shifting to a more strategic and synergic focus on achieving gender outcomes will require a shift of incentives and resources (human and budgetary) toward supporting implementation and country-driven engagement, strengthening the gender skills and expertise of Bank Group staff, streamlining and duly financing the Bank Group gender architecture, and revising and complementing the current gender tag and gender flag system to increase focus on the most gender-transformative engagements.

The evaluation’s findings underpin three recommendations for the Bank Group to improve its country-driven engagement for gender equality and the achievement of results.

Strengthening Country-Driven Engagement

Strengthen the country-driven engagement model for gender equality, with greater selectivity, prioritization, and coordination of the country portfolio activities supporting gender equality objectives and an increased focus on implementation. This could be accomplished by (i) ensuring that Bank Group core diagnostics and Country Gender Assessments not only analyze gender inequalities but also provide guidance on which gender inequalities to prioritize and key constraints to address; (ii) explicitly integrating those gender priorities in country strategies and setting up criteria and incentives to translate the country strategy gender priorities into expected results and activities, selected based on the World Bank and IFC comparative advantages and in collaboration with development partners and other key stakeholders, such as civil society organizations and women’s rights organizations; (iii) identifying the portfolio of activities required to achieve the prioritized goals in country strategy documents and ensuring reporting of progress toward relevant outcomes; and (iv) focusing financial and human resources on the selected gender priorities to ensure that the Bank Group portfolio addressing gender inequalities is effectively coordinated to leverage synergy across instruments, projects, and institutions.

Enhancing Capacity and Monitoring and Evaluation

Develop the capacity of World Bank and IFC monitoring and evaluation systems to track and account for complex gender results; incentivize the achievement of outcomes at the operational, country, and corporate levels; and regularly report on progress. This could be accomplished by (i) introducing a system to distinguish between activities of the World Bank and IFC that are gender sensitive (that reach the minimum standard) and those that aim to be gender transformative and have a strategic impact on gender equality in the countries; (ii) improving measurement of results using appropriate indicators—both quantitative and qualitative—to capture outputs attributable to the Bank Group and outcomes that the Bank Group contributes to; (iii) ensuring that project-level and country-level monitoring systems regularly report on gender-related results and processes during implementation of projects and country strategies; and (iv) establishing outcome-oriented indicators at the corporate level that go beyond outreach and processes to show progress in gender equality.

Redefining the Gender Architecture

Redefine the current Bank Group gender architecture to specify roles and responsibilities; avoid overlaps and replication of functions; strengthen underresourced tasks, especially implementation of gender-related activities and support to country engagement; improve capacities; and enforce accountability. This could be accomplished by (i) defining a streamlined structure to avoid overlaps and replications of tasks and to clarify roles and responsibilities, reporting lines, and collaboration and accountability mechanisms of gender human resources (the Gender Group, regional gender coordinators, Global Practice and industry gender focal points and advisers, country gender focal points, gender platforms and other gender coordination mechanisms, GILs, and so on) and management at all levels and task team leaders; (ii) strengthening the gender expertise of staff, managers, and task team leaders through capacity building tailored to different functions, sectors, and contexts, including shadowing, on-the-job and peer-to-peer training, coaching, and other forms of learning; (iii) ensuring that gender experts with adequate seniority are available to support each country engagement, including through decentralizing gender skills to local offices, building local gender expertise, and avoiding overreliance on consultants; and (iv) ensuring that tasks are properly funded through the Bank Group budget, with trust funds strategically leveraged to support priority engagements.