Women key to effective development

Unfolding events in Afghanistan have brought worldwide attention to the severe treatment of women under the Taliban. As the Afghan people prepare to rebuild their country, and as they explore ways to include women in this process, World Bank experts say that countries which promote women’s rights and increase their access to resources and schooling enjoy lower poverty rates, faster economic growth and less corruption than countries that do not.

Gender inequality hurts all members of society, not just girls and women. World Bank research — including an in-depth report released earlier this year called Engendering Development shows that countries with smaller gaps between women and men in areas such as education, employment, and property rights not only have lower child malnutrition and mortality, they also have more transparent business and government and faster economic growth, which in turn helps to further narrow the gender gap.

“Increasing gender equality is central to the idea of development as freedom, of expanding the choices and control that people have over their lives,” says Nicholas Stern, World Bank Chief Economist, and Senior Vice-President for Development Economics. “The evidence shows that education, health productivity, credit and governance work better when women are involved.”

“Societies that discriminate on the basis of gender pay a significant price — in greater poverty, slower economic growth, weaker governance, and a lower quality of life,” says Elizabeth King, Lead Economist in the Bank’s Development Research Group and co-author of Engendering Development.

In fact, research shows that countries that reduce gender gaps in basic rights, access to resources, and economic opportunities achieve more effective development — more rapid economic growth, better governance, and higher levels of well-being. The benefits of promoting equality between women and men are significant and wide-ranging. Some examples:

Productivity and Economic Growth

— In Africa, improving rural women’s access to productive resources including education, land, and fertilizer could increase agricultural productivity by as much as one-fifth.

— In Bangladesh, microcredit provided to women has higher returns in terms of raising household consumption (income) than the same credit provided to men.

— Cross-country studies suggest that if the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa had been as successful as East Asia in narrowing the gender gap in education during 1960-1990, GNP [gross national product] per capita in those regions would have grown by 0.5 and 0.9 percentage points higher per year, substantial increases over actual rates.

Governance

— Cross-country studies show that where women have greater rights and play a greater role in public life, levels of corruption in government are lower.

— In the republic of Georgia, firms owned or managed by women are significantly less likely to make unofficial payments to government officials than those owned or managed by men.

Well-Being

— Greater equality in education between women and men means healthier families. If African women and men had more equal schooling, child mortality would have been 25 per cent lower than it was in 1990.

— A cross-country study of 63 countries finds that gains in women’s education made the single largest contribution to declines in malnutrition in 1970-95, accounting for 43 per cent of the total.

— Smaller gender gaps in literacy translate into lower HIV infection rates, even after accounting for the effects of per capita income and other factors known to affect HIV prevalence.

— Women’s income, not just education matters. In Brazil, income in the hands of mothers has four times the impact on child nutrition than the same income in the hands of fathers. Similar patterns are seen in such diverse countries as Bangladesh and C te d’Ivoire.

Overall, girls and women have made significant progress in recent decades. For example, over the past 25 years, girl’s primary school enrollment rates doubled in the Middle East, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. And in the past half-century, women’s life expectancy has increased by 15-20 years in developing countries.

Despite this progress, however, women worldwide continue to have fewer rights and less control over important resources than men. In South Asia, women have only about half as many years of education as men, and female secondary school enrollment rates are only two-thirds of male rates. Control of land and of other forms of capital is also highly unequal. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, women have limited rights to own land, even though they are the major producers of food crops. And several countries around the world, women still cannot travel outside the home or transact business without their husbands’ consent.

“Experiences from cross-country analysis and case studies show that economic development and institutional change are both necessary to improve the status of women.” says Andrew Mason, Senior Economist in the Bank’s Gender and Development Group and co-author of Engendering Development. “Societies progress more rapidly if they also adopt specific measures to narrow gender gaps.”

Many ongoing World Bank efforts aim to help reduce gender inequality through the programmes and projects it supports in developing countries, including:

Education

Since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, World Bank lending for girls’ education has totalled approximately US$5.3 billion. The Bank’s girls’ education programs give special emphasis to countries where primary enrollments are low and/or gender disparities in primary and basic enrollment rates are large.

Health, nutrition and population

To date the World Bank has lent more than $4 billion to support population and reproductive health activities throughout the world and is the world’s largest external funder of health programmes. In 1999, two thirds of the loans in these areas included actions aimed at promoting gender equality.