How the World Bank Supports Adaptive Social Protection in Crisis Response
Chapter 2 | Contributions to Adaptive Social Protection Systems
Highlights
The World Bank was a pioneer in conceptualizing adaptive social protection through its diagnostics, analytics, and knowledge-building contributions.
World Bank social protection lending grew sharply in high-risk countries during the evaluated period, expanding into all Regions and country types and adding many adaptive features.
The World Bank’s increased focus on low-income, lower-middle-income, and fragile countries; its efforts to integrate adaptive elements into foundational social protection programs; and its work to address barriers to expanding social safety nets during shocks were highly relevant.
The World Bank–supported projects consistently emphasized regular program strengthening but paid inconsistent attention to aligning their design in countries’ institutional frameworks and ensuring that resources required to respond were in place.
Most cash transfers and public works programs prioritized women as beneficiaries but often lacked supporting measures to foster deeper gender results.
This chapter assesses the World Bank’s knowledge and financing contributions to making SP systems more adaptive to shocks. It begins by examining the World Bank’s contributions to the conceptual foundations of ASP. It then explores its knowledge support, followed by an in-depth analysis of its financing support, which includes the World Bank’s types of programmatic and operational support and its efforts in removing barriers to effective ASP and addressing gender-related challenges. It finds that this work has been relevant and grounded in solid diagnostics but could have more consistently aligned with countries’ institutional landscapes.
Conceptual Contributions
The World Bank’s ASP framework and its four building blocks advanced the conceptual understanding of ASP (see chapter 1). The framework outlines the spectrum of activities necessary to strengthen and enable SP systems to contribute effectively to shock responses, eventually building household resilience. The framework acknowledges that different types of covariate shocks affect households in unique ways, suggesting the need for tailored policy and programmatic responses. Nevertheless, the building blocks provide a solid basis for a structured approach to advancing ASP across various covariate shocks. World Bank knowledge products and diagnostics, including its stress test tool, frequently refer to the framework’s four building blocks (described in table 1.1). The framework aligns well with those of other actors and embodies a shared vision that SP systems can play a crucial role in supporting households and communities in preparing for, responding to, and adapting to diverse types of shocks and stresses, working alongside the DRM and humanitarian sectors. However, the framework focuses on social assistance and does not consider the role of social insurance and labor market interventions in responding to shocks.
The World Bank’s tool for stress testing SP systems supported policy dialogues. The tool was designed to assess the resilience and effectiveness of an SP system under various adverse conditions. Before the tool’s introduction, identifying gaps in crisis preparedness and determining the scale of effort required for SP systems to effectively respond to various shocks were challenging. The tool enables countries to assess their programs and prioritize investments in specific areas of SP systems that will improve their shock responsiveness (World Bank 2021a). So far, it has been applied in 42 countries. Key informants at the global level praised the tool’s implementation process but noted that results are static snapshots. They emphasized the importance of promoting the use of such tools, either in whole or in part, to monitor progress regularly.
Knowledge Support
The World Bank was a prolific producer of analytics. Between FY12 and FY22, it initiated 155 country-focused ASA activities in 44 out of the 70 countries covered by this evaluation. These activities fully or partially focused on ways to make SP systems adaptive (box 2.1).
The World Bank engaged in joint learning with clients and partners. The World Bank supported joint learning initiatives, knowledge exchange, and South-South learning—bringing together stakeholders from different countries—in at least 26 percent of the portfolio countries. Evaluation interviews showed appreciation for joint learning and study tours. Trust funds were essential for these learning activities. For example, the SASPP trust fund finances a regional platform that promotes research, coordination, knowledge sharing, and learning across six countries. While much knowledge generation was collaborative, the World Bank at times also competed with other key actors over primacy in the space, according to the interviews and literature.
The World Bank used ASA to inform operations how to design for shock responsiveness. The evaluation team identified 24 ASA—valued at $24 million—that were tied to 20 investment project financing or Program-for-Results (PforR) operations, 15 percent of the portfolio’s total. Out of $24 million, $2.9 million were financed through trust funds. Key themes of these ASA included building resilient systems, supporting early-warning systems (EWSs) and disaster financing strategies, improving data and social registries, and fostering gender inclusion. Out of 24 ASA, 16 financed impact evaluations, focusing on assessing regular programs’ effectiveness, analyzing specific program components, and evaluating targeting mechanisms to ensure inclusivity. In general, these evaluations aimed to enhance impact, targeting, and evidence-based policy making of SP systems. Among the 16 ASA supporting impact evaluations, at most 4 ASA were on shock responses, focusing on the impact of health insurance programs on household resilience to shocks and assessing different shock responses. This aligns with the findings of an unpublished note from the Development Impact Evaluation that highlights the scarcity of impact evaluation evidence on ASP.
Box 2.1. Areas and Subareas of Support in Advisory Services and Analytics
Integrated support for strengthening adaptive social protection (ASP) systems includes system assessments and diagnostics with follow-up capacity building; just-in-time technical assistance for design, implementation, and evaluation of ASP systems and programs; policy dialogue; and collaboration and coordination with technical and financial partners. This integrated support was sometimes tailored to specific vulnerable groups (for example, support to gender-smart ASP or attention to the needs of people with disabilities).
Support for improving specific shock-responsive elements includes design and implementation of emergency cash transfers, proof-of-concept activities for disaster risk management and decision support tools, reports on financial resilience against natural disasters, and support to disaster financing strategies and disaster insurance.
Diagnostics and assessments include climate and health stress tests of social protection systems, estimation of welfare impacts of shocks, impact evaluations of social safety net programs, and social protection expenditure analyses.
Dialogue, coordination, or strategies include advisory services and analytics activities that seek to strengthen synergies among the social protection and labor and disaster risk management and health sectors within the World Bank, activities that exclusively support experience sharing and learning on ASP, and activities that support only ASP strategies.
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio analysis.
The ASA tied to operations helped scale up ASP and enhance program design. For example, in Burkina Faso, the World Bank evaluated an innovative approach that integrated cash, health, and behavioral change within a cash transfer program. In Lebanon, the ASA helped shift the focus of a project from a poverty graduation pilot to studying refugee-host dynamics. In Haiti, studies assessed readiness of the SP system, recommending harmonization of programs and improvements in disaster response. Some ASA helped projects identify gender-focused activities (for example, on economic inclusion for women, gender-based violence prevention and response, and monitoring and evaluation of gender outcomes).
Financing Support
The World Bank sharply expanded its SP financing. The evaluation identified 202 operations in 67 out of 70 high-risk countries selected for this evaluation led or co-led by the Social Protection and Labor Global Practice, as well as CAT DDOs during the period. The World Bank committed $53 billion for these operations between FY12 and FY22, for all purposes, not only ASP. Commitments grew sharply after FY19 in response to COVID-19 and other shocks (figure 2.1). There is little doubt that the World Bank’s financing contributed to the much-needed resources. Countries’ SP systems are often underfunded, resulting in undercoverage, low benefits, limited diversity of services to address differential needs, and few resources for shock responses (ILO 2021).
Figure 2.1. The World Bank Sharply Expanded Its Social Protection Lending
Figure 2.1. The World Bank Sharply Expanded Its Social Protection Lending
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
Note: The graph includes the evaluation portfolio, the selection of which is described in appendix A.
The SP portfolio shifted toward low-income regions during the period. An IEG evaluation found that the World Bank’s work on social safety nets (SSNs) tilted toward more advanced regions of the developing world and recommended more focus on lower-income countries (World Bank 2011). By FY22, the World Bank had provided financing for SP in all regions and in countries at all income levels. The evaluated portfolio tilted toward low-income regions with 27 percent of projects in low-income countries, 46 percent in lower-middle-income countries, and 36 percent in countries classified as fragile and conflict-affected situations (figure 2.2). The bulk of this portfolio was in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia, with less concentration in East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, and Middle East and North Africa.
Figure 2.2. The World Bank’s Social Protection Financing Tilted Toward Low-Income Regions
Figure 2.2. The World Bank’s Social Protection Financing Tilted Toward Low-Income Regions
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
Note: N = 202 projects. AFE = Eastern and Southern Africa; AFW = Western and Central Africa; EAP = East Asia and Pacific; ECA = Europe and Central Asia; FCS = fragile and conflict-affected situations; LAC = Latin America and the Caribbean; MENA = Middle East and North Africa; SAR = South Asia.
Programmatic and Operational Support
Strengthening regular social assistance programs and their information systems were the most common types of World Bank support. The original concept of ASP included adaptation to climate change and building household and community resilience. In practice, the World Bank has focused largely on enhancing social assistance programs’ ability to respond to different types of shocks. Figure 2.3 shows that the most frequently supported areas were enhancements of various types of safety net programs, done in 93 percent of the portfolio’s countries. This aligns with the recommendations of IEG’s Social Safety Nets: An Evaluation of World Bank Support, 2000–2010 (World Bank 2011) and the ASP framework, which highlights existing SP systems to be the cornerstones for building household resilience. This was followed by support for enhancing information systems in 70 percent of the countries; support for adaptive programs (that is, program expansions in response to shocks) in 64 percent of the countries; and coordination and partnerships in 63 percent of the countries. The least frequently supported areas in the portfolio were EWS and predictable financing (that is, ensuring that resources required to respond were in place). These projects supported many types of safety nets (figure 2.4), social insurance, and labor market programs, but, as mentioned in chapter 1, this evaluation focused on the operations’ support for social assistance.
Support for adaptive and dual-use features of SP grew rapidly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (figure 2.5). Adaptive features focus only on the use of SP as a shock response for all types of covariate shocks, including natural disasters, and would not be necessary for the delivery of the regular SP program. Dual-use features are useful and necessary for both the delivery of the regular SP program and the use of SP as a shock response and are thus a broad category. This includes the World Bank’s support to program expansions that jumped from FY20 onward in response to COVID-19. More than half of projects approved in FY20 supported adding new beneficiaries (horizontal expansions), adding benefits, or extending benefits’ duration (vertical expansions) or launched emergency programs, compared with about 30 percent between FY12 and FY19. The addition of such adaptive elements was often part of the World Bank’s support for gradually strengthening SP systems. For example, in Djibouti, the World Bank helped develop a flexible SP system with cash-for-work programs to address drought-induced food insecurity and later reinforced these systems to rapidly respond to the COVID-19 crisis.
Figure 2.3. Types of Support by Cluster Across Countries
Figure 2.3. Types of Support by Cluster Across Countries
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
Figure 2.4. Many Types of Safety Nets Are Represented in the Evaluation Portfolio
Figure 2.4. Many Types of Safety Nets Are Represented in the Evaluation Portfolio
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
Figure 2.5. The World Bank’s Expanded Investments in Dual-Use and Adaptive Features
Figure 2.5. The World Bank’s Expanded Investments in Dual-Use and Adaptive Features
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
Delivery chain strengthening and program financing were the most frequently supported subclusters (figure 2.6). In most countries (58 out of 67 in the portfolio), the World Bank supported strengthening the delivery chain of regular programs—that is, management information systems, payment systems, targeting, outreach to communities, grievance redress mechanisms, and monitoring and evaluation systems. This type of support is the main feature of much SP investment project financing and PforR lending and is coded as “dual use” in figure 2.5 because it is critical for programs’ functioning in both normal times and when responding to different covariate shocks. The World Bank supported expansion of regular programs with financing for coverage expansions or benefit increased in 50 out of 67 countries with SP support. The World Bank supported adaptive program expansions in 43 out of 67 countries via designing or financing horizontal expansions, vertical expansions, or new emergency programs.
In addition, the World Bank frequently invested in enhancing information systems and promoting stakeholder coordination. The World Bank supported the strengthening of information systems in 70 percent of the 67 portfolio countries, often through social registries, integrated beneficiary registries, and pre- and postshock assessment tools. The World Bank–supported projects facilitated coordination, learning, or knowledge exchanges in 63 percent of these countries.
The World Bank–supported programs used different targeting mechanisms, most frequently proxy means testing and community-based targeting. Some programs used hybrid methods (box 2.2). The evaluation found quite few examples of shock-responsive targeting. For example, Niger used drought early-warning indicators to trigger cash transfers, and many countries used categorical targeting to respond to earnings losses resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns. Project documents occasionally mentioned capacity building for better targeting mechanisms or focused on accuracy of targeting.
Figure 2.6. Country Coverage Across Clusters and Subclusters
Figure 2.6. Country Coverage Across Clusters and Subclusters
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
Note: The figure shows country coverage of the identified financing portfolio, by type of support. N = 67 countries. SP = social protection; SR = social registry.
Box 2.2. Targeting Mechanisms in Social Protection Programs
Proxy means testing: Most frequently referenced, proxy means testing was used, for example, in Albania and the Republic of Yemen as a tool for identifying eligible households based on measurable socioeconomic criteria.
Community-based targeting: Frequently mentioned, this approach was used in Burkina Faso and Mozambique, leveraging local community input to validate beneficiaries and align statistical data with local realities.
Geographic targeting: Moderately frequent, examples from Burkina Faso and Kenya demonstrated the use of poverty and vulnerability maps to prioritize regions affected by drought or food insecurity.
Hybrid approaches: Occasionally mentioned, Senegal and Viet Nam used combinations of proxy means testing, management information systems, and community-based targeting for greater accuracy and transparency.
Categorical targeting: Programs target specific demographic groups, such as children or refugees. In Tonga, the World Bank supported families with secondary school children. In the Republic of Congo, the World Bank targeted refugees and host communities for health and education benefits.
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
The emphasis on combining regular program support with support in data and delivery systems aligns with recommendations from the literature. The structured literature review and IEG’s Social Safety Nets: An Evaluation of World Bank Support, 2000–2010 (World Bank 2011) found that the readiness and capacity for scaling up SP national systems largely depends on preexisting programs and the robustness of their underlying data and delivery systems. What countries can do in emergencies broadly depends on what they have. For example, low coverage of routine SP programs—particularly among the most vulnerable—is a major obstacle to a stronger role for SP in shock response. This was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which countries with high coverage of social insurance and social assistance were able to expand assistance through regular or newly introduced emergency programs faster and more effectively (Bastagli and Lowe 2021; Beazley et al. 2021; Williams and Martinez 2020; World Bank 2022).
One-third of the projects in the evaluation’s portfolio supported climate-sensitive SP. At least 74 out of 202 projects in the financing portfolio addressed climate risks. Promoting resilience and livelihood diversification was the most prominent (with 21 percent of projects addressing it), followed by shock-responsive and adaptive safety nets (18 percent), and gender-focused climate adaptation (15 percent; figure 2.7).
Figure 2.7. Climate-Sensitive Programming
Figure 2.7. Climate-Sensitive Programming
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
World Bank projects did not routinely support cross-sector coordination, particularly between SP and DRM. Disaster preparedness is usually led by DRM staff and agencies. IEG’s evaluation of disaster risk reduction noted that SP had made progress in contributing to disaster risk reduction, albeit from a low base (World Bank 2022). Unpacking this further, this evaluation’s portfolio analysis shows that SP operations sought to foster institutional links between SP and DRM in 12 out of 67 countries and the use of EWS for setting thresholds or triggering SP responses in 11 out of 67 countries. While support for developing the EWS in the first place would typically not be part of the SP operations in this evaluation’s portfolio, the evaluation finds a few positive examples. In Burkina Faso, the World Bank enhanced the targeting system by integrating geographic information system data to identify shock-prone areas and establish scalability mechanisms with defined triggers and decision rules for safety net responses. In Kenya, the World Bank helped scale up payments during droughts based on activation of emergency triggers. A few projects supported cost projections for disaster responses. Conversely, some case studies observed that preparedness for sudden-onset disasters did not incorporate ASP as a standard tool, particularly in high-risk countries with less mature SP systems. Mozambique’s Country Partnership Framework addresses DRM and ASP under separate objectives (World Bank 2023b). The World Bank’s publication on climate change and flooding in Mauritania does not mention ASP (Coudouel et al. 2023). However, the World Bank–housed Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery has sponsored analytic work that integrates DRM and ASP perspectives. The evaluation identified 31 Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery grants related to ASP within the evaluation period supporting 20 nonlending activities and 11 financing operations. These grants focused on program design, data and information systems, and institutional arrangements. Chapter 3 shows that this lack of routine support for policy coherence, cross-sector coordination, and links between SP and DRM limited outcome achievement.
Having funds available when needed enables effective shock responses; as a result, operations in one-third of the countries sought predictable finance. Past crises showed that fiscally constrained countries were unable to respond or relied on donor assistance. IEG’s Social Safety Nets: An Evaluation of World Bank Support, 2000–2010 emphasized the need for predictable financing for shock response (World Bank 2011), and successive World Bank SP strategies have highlighted the need for flexible and prompt financial mechanisms to fund SP shock responses, as well as advanced fiscal planning capacity to address shocks. Countries that relied largely on overseas donor assistance expanded coverage more slowly than those using national resources to fund their responses to COVID-19, according to the evaluation’s literature review. The World Bank’s production of disaster risk financing (DRF) diagnostics and strategies was therefore relevant. These were done in at least half of the evaluated countries, often led by the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice. However, the World Bank operations in the portfolio included support for securing predictable finance for shock response in only 33 percent of the 67 countries. This figure may be an underestimate because operations led by other Global Practices (and therefore not included in the evaluation portfolio) could also have supported DRF. Box 2.3 shows examples of how operations supported financial and institutional preparedness, and box 2.4 offers examples from the literature—not necessarily supported by the World Bank—of approaches to predictable financing support.
Box 2.3. World Bank Support for Building Financial and Institutional Preparedness for Shocks
Through the operations in the evaluation portfolio, the World Bank supported approximately 22 countries in implementing laws, funds, policies, and strategies related to financial resilience and institutional preparedness for shock and disaster response:
- Colombia updated the National Disaster, Epidemic, and Pandemic Risk Financing Strategy to enhance fiscal resilience.
- The Dominican Republic developed institutional frameworks for quantifying and managing disaster risks.
- India allowed states to use up to 50 percent of disaster response funds for social protection and increased central grants for livelihood support and cash transfers during relief efforts.
- Jamaica raised the Contingencies Fund ceiling to expedite relief efforts.
- Kenya approved the National Disaster Risk Financing Strategy to improve financial preparedness.
- Madagascar established the National Disaster Fund to finance preparedness and emergency response and proposed new laws enabling sovereign catastrophe insurance and household resilience products.
- The Philippines enacted the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act to shift focus to ex ante preparedness and prevention and integrated insurance premium payments into the National Disaster Risk Management Fund.
- Tonga approved the Disaster Risk Management Act for a proactive and integrated disaster management approach.
Source: Independent Evaluation Group portfolio review.
Box 2.4. Options for Enhancing Disaster Risk Financing
The literature review conducted by the Independent Evaluation Group highlighted several approaches to enhancing shock response financing. The examples below illustrate options from the literature, regardless of whether the initiatives received World Bank support.
Estimating potential costs of different shocks in advance and simulating response options. This approach allows for the development of contingency plans and can lead to more readily available financing. For example, Senegal’s National Food Security Council estimates drought impacts annually to inform the Food Insecurity National Response Plan. This plan incorporates cash and in-kind transfers and uses Senegal’s social registry for targeted assistance.
The African Risk Capacity is an African disaster risk facility offering drought insurance. Before a country can purchase a policy, it must develop contingency plans, including the costs of response measures and how payouts will benefit affected households.
Identifying financial resources and preplanning via a risk-layered approach. A risk-layered approach provides a structured way to manage and mitigate risks by categorizing them into different layers based on their severity and likelihood. This approach ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, allowing for a more effective and timely response to various types of shocks. Indonesia launched its National Disaster Risk Finance and Insurance Strategy in 2018, which includes both risk retention and transfer mechanisms to complement the state budget. The Pooling Fund for Disasters enables transparency, efficient planning, and quicker assistance for disaster-affected families.
Planning for timely disbursements. Ensuring timely disbursements of emergency funding requires streamlining the funding process for efficient access to resources for local implementation during emergencies. Some steps to this effect include (i) triggering funding via objective early-warning mechanisms to initiate funding releases and keeping the process free from political influence; (ii) minimizing administrative delays to quickly release emergency funds when needed; (iii) enabling direct funding channels to local areas and allowing for expedited transfers from international partners to district and provincial levels; and (iv) planning in advance for sufficient liquidity at the local level by setting up contingency funds and arrangements. For example, with World Bank support, Malawi put in place a mechanism preparing its Social Cash Transfer Program to expand during climate shocks, with preset funding triggers, prepositioned financing, and pretargeting of vulnerable households.
Source: Independent Evaluation Group structured literature review.
Removing Barriers to Adaptive Social Protection
The World Bank addressed relevant barriers to expanding SSNs’ ability to cover covariate shocks, although some challenges persist. Triangulating across the literature, the portfolio review, and the case studies, the evaluation team found the following:
- The World Bank has supported social registries in many countries. However, the effectiveness of social registries for shock response is limited by incomplete data coverage and outdated information, which require significant time and resources to address (Barca and Beazley 2019). Interviews suggest that, because of its preference for the use of social registries, the World Bank generally does not support lighter information systems that might be fit for purpose in some cases and facilitate rapid targeting mechanisms, which could be beneficial when social registries show severe limitations as seen in Burkina Faso and the Philippines. Moreover, the evaluation finds that foundational identity systems can help in ensuring broader participation in assistance programs and limiting political interference in targeting.
- The World Bank also works on data sharing agreements and interoperability efforts, but these initiatives apply to countries with more strongly developed data systems, such as Nepal, affecting only a small percentage of countries.
- The World Bank has invested in research and policy dialogue encouraging humanitarian actors to align their cash and in-kind transfer programs to increase coherence, as seen in regions such as the Sahel (Kreidler et al. 2022). In Burkina Faso, this reduced the number of transfer values implemented by different actors from 18 to 6, from one lean season to the next. In Mozambique, the World Bank approved a transfer value with the government for drought assistance that the World Food Programme (WFP) and NGOs subsequently used for their own transfers.
- The World Bank has heavily invested in digital payment processes. The Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice often contributed to this work. The World Bank also contributed to easing know-your-customer regulations, as in Mozambique, allowing vulnerable beneficiaries to access COVID-19–related transfers more easily. This work is especially important in countries where vulnerable population groups have low financial access.
- The World Bank has stepped up work on preplanned risk financing; however, more needs to be done given its importance for rapid crisis response.
Integrating Gender into Adaptive Social Protection
Most cash transfers and public works programs prioritized women as beneficiaries but often lacked measures to ensure deeper gender results. The evaluation team reviewed the gender aspects in a randomly selected subset of 50 of the portfolio’s projects. Projects have made substantial progress in targeting women’s participation in cash transfers and public works, done in about 75 percent of projects. However, the World Bank has room to deepen its approach to gender beyond targeting. More than half (54 percent) of these projects lacked accompanying measures to explicitly make them gender responsive or gender transformative. Only 6 percent out of the 50 projects were gender transformative. These terms can be defined as follows (World Bank 2024c):
- Gender-responsive programs explicitly address the contextual needs of women. They are fair and equitable in both processes and outcomes. These programs are informed by a gender analysis and respond to the challenges women, girls, and gender-diverse persons face in accessing and benefiting from SP.
- Gender-transformative programs aim to actively challenge and transform unequal gender relations. These proactively promote change in processes, access, and outcomes through deliberate design and implementation choices. They do so to ensure that women and girls (and when relevant, marginalized men and boys and other gender-diverse persons) can benefit from SP programs and to enable empowerment and transformative outcomes.
Projects prioritized women by aligning with traditional gender roles and positioning mothers as caregivers, rather than advancing gender equality. IEG’s review found that projects often targeted women to receive educational sessions related to fulfilling childcare responsibilities or meeting cash transfer conditionalities, such as health visits. Such requirements treat women as primary caregivers and can add to their time constraints.
Many projects lacked localized and context-specific analyses of women’s and girls’ needs, undermining gender responsiveness. Many projects relied on national-level statistics rather than contextual analyses of the specific challenges faced by women and girls in different project settings. For example, in public works, low salaries and provision of childcare and training are often used to attract women’s participation; projects did not present analysis to justify that these interventions were aligned with the needs of women and girls. A task leader of one of the reviewed projects stated that the “current approach leans toward replicating experiences and approaches rather than tailoring them to the unique needs of the target group, which exceeds a thousand people.” This lack of understanding limits projects’ ability to respond effectively to women’s and girls’ needs. For example, Tanzania’s shift from cash in hand to e-payments encountered significant implementation barriers, as many women lacked identification documents, bank accounts, or personal phones (World Bank 2024c).
Several project teams used lessons from prior operations to strengthen gender responsiveness. For example, SASPP advanced evidence-based design for improving the gender sensitivity of ASP systems. Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net Project II used lessons from the previous phase to include community sensitization sessions that challenge traditional gender roles, encourage shared domestic responsibilities, and engage men in discussions on family planning. The Arab Republic of Egypt’s Strengthening Social Safety Net Project used an additional financing to enhance gender responsiveness through a communication campaign addressing harmful gender norms, along with a pilot program to support women’s self-employment and wage employment.
Projects increasingly recognize the intersection of gender, fragility, and vulnerability to disasters, but theories of change remain incomplete. Ten of the reviewed projects recognized the vulnerabilities of displaced and conflict-affected women, incorporating targeted interventions such as psychosocial support for survivors. Five projects recognized the disproportionate impact of disasters on women and supported joint land titles for housing reconstruction and other measures. However, there was much variation. Some project documents’ theories of change failed to identify the specific contextual vulnerabilities of women in affected project areas. Those projects often lacked gender-responsive or gender-transformative approaches.