This World Bank report draws on data from the most recent Nigeria General Household Survey to makes five critical contributions towards improving gender inclusion in Nigeria: (1) highlighting the gender gaps in labor force participation; (2) documenting the magnitude and drivers of the gender gaps in key economic sectors; (3) diving deep into three contextual constraints: land, livestock, and occupational segregation; (4) measuring the costs of the gender gaps; and (5) offering policy and programming recommendations of innovative options to close the gender gaps.

This report outlines the great potential for feminist digital activism to catalyze transformative shifts in thinking and behavior. It analyzes how hashtag campaigns, organized groups and individual activists post-feminist content online to change attitudes, behavior, and influence policies and laws. Finally, the report considers how online and offline activism can bolster one another.

This report provides an overview of the laws and regulations that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies. It presents eight indicators structured around women’s interactions with the law as they progress through their lives and careers: Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension. Finally, the report identifies the barriers to women’s economic participation and encourages the reform of discriminatory laws.

Buildher aims to equip women in Kenya with accredited construction skills, which are expected to allow beneficiaries to have greater financial independence and prosperity, to change male attitudes and to promote gender equality within the construction industry.

This report explores how a well-being approach can help build back better and identifies common well-being priorities for recovery. The proposed solutions include the need to: increase job and financial security of households, particularly of those most affected by the crisis; promote equality of opportunity and mitigate the scarring effects of the crisis on the most vulnerable individuals and workers, with a focus on youth, women and the low-skilled; lift the burden of poor physical and mental health; take decisive action on climate change and environmental degradation, and reinforce trust in others and public institutions as the basis for greater social cohesion in the future.

This report presents a first diagnostic of Africa’s gender gap in financing early-stage ventures in the digital economy (start-ups). The report’s findings indicate that since 2013, only 3 percent of total funding for Africa’s tech start-ups went to all-female founding teams, compared with 76 percent of funding for all-male teams. The report’s analysis shows that female founders are underrepresented in the sectors that attract the most financing; however, even those all-female teams that are working in sectors with high investor interest remain less likely to receive financing than all-male teams, and they receive smaller amounts if they do. Male and female entrepreneurs in the report’s sample also followed different financing paths: female founders were less likely to pitch for equity investments; conversely, they were more likely to apply for bank loans, or to prefer growth from retained earnings.

The transition to a green economy will create many new jobs around the world, including in sub-Saharan Africa. But will women share in these new jobs, and will the economic transformation help them move into higher-paid, more stable jobs that require more education and skills?  This brief presents some insights into the green job opportunities available for women in Sub-Saharan Africa and provides policy recommendations to establish appropriate and enabling policies and programmes to ensure that women get an equitable share of green jobs.

This report seeks to focus attention on the challenges that Africa’s women entrepreneurs face and identify practical solutions. The report draws on new, high-quality, household and firm-level data to present the clearest evidence to date about the barriers to growth and profitability faced by women entrepreneurs. It goes beyond looking at contextual, endowment and household restrictions in isolation, and, through deep-dive analysis, uncovers new evidence on how social norms, networks and household-level decision making contribute to business performance. It analyzes how they are linked to each other and to women’s strategic business decisions.

This study exposes failure to factor in gender in COVID-19 education responses and widening gaps in access to quality education following school closures. Citing some 90 countries, the study shows that despite governments' and partners’ swift responses to school closures, remote learning strategies in most countries failed to account for gender-based considerations and barriers that children face at home.

This report focuses on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and presents findings drawn from the narratives of over 150 young female STEM professionals in seven countries. The report showcases how confidence in their own abilities helps women deal with setbacks. At the same time, the report highlights the critical role that support from parents, mentors, and partners play in women’s success in STEM. Finally, the report concludes that even where training and hiring environments support women in STEM careers, discrimination in day-to-day delivery remains a challenge.

This Note builds on research covering the three countries with the highest concentration of Syrian refugees displaced since 2011: Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. It is intended to inform policymakers and practitioners on the barriers that Syrian refugees, especially women, face in securing work to earn a livelihood. This Note highlights initiatives designed to address those barriers, but does not enumerate all of them. While not specifically addressing internally-displaced persons (IDPs) within Syria, this Note could serve as a blueprint for examining and addressing many of the same barriers women face in Syria.

This report brings together the voices and experiences of over 14,000 girls across many continents. It aims at uncovering and understanding their experiences being online: what platforms they use, what is their experience of harassment, who are the perpetrators and the impact of harassment on them.

Young women in Africa are less likely to be employed than young men, as a result of gaps in access to resources such as skills, time, and capital, and due to underlying social norms. Adolescence is a particularly critical time to intervene, as teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school can have severe impacts on future employment and earnings with significant consequences on their lives. At the macroeconomic level, investing in adolescent girls is also crucial for Sub-Saharan Africa`s demographic dividend.

This report places the notion of social inclusion in an analysis of Africa’s achievements and challenges. Its interdisciplinary approach uses evidence to bring empirical weight to issues that are often debated through advocacy and contestation. It also contributes to the priority areas of a new regional strategy for the Africa region of the World Bank by focusing on women’s empowerment, digital technology, fragility, and climate change, among others.

This Jobs Solutions Note identifies practical solutions for development practitioners to proactively integrate gender inclusion in digital jobs programs. Based on curated knowledge and evidence for a specific topic and relevant to jobs, the Jobs Solutions Notes are not intended to be exhaustive; they provide key lessons, solutions and approaches synthesized from the experiences of the World Bank Group and partners. This Note draws from S4YE’s 2018 annual report, Digital Jobs for Youth: Young Women in the Digital Economy, highlighting new and emerging strategies to designing gender-inclusive digital jobs interventions for youth. The Note employs a nuanced definition of “digital jobs” to enable practitioners and policy makers to develop a range of interventions tailored to specific contexts and target groups, to improve young women’s employment outcomes from digital jobs programs.

This brief examines how the World Bank’s ‘Gaza Emergency Cash for Work and Self-Employment Support’ project supports NGOs that are connecting unemployed youth with online work opportunities. The project will help fund skills training and digital job support to 750 youth (including 375 young women). The brief highlights challenges facing young women in the West Bank and Gaza – who experience high unemployment rates – and the strategies used to encourage their program participation and empower them to engage in e-work.

This brief examines how the World Bank’s ‘E-Commerce for Women-Led SMEs’ project addresses the constraints faced by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) run or managed by women operating in Algeria; Djibouti, the Arab Republic of Egypt; Jordan; Lebanon; Morocco; and Tunisia. It highlights how the World Bank seeks to support women-led SMEs (WSMEs) in the Middle East North Africa region (MENA) in accessing global markets through e-commerce platforms, and the strategies used to help WSMEs access financial resources, develop capacity, and increase sales.

This toolkit provides advice for young women who could become digital professionals and employers struggling to fill the job openings in their companies. The focus is on young women that are
Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEETs) – hence they face various risks, problems, and negative orientations. 
 

This manual guides business development practitioners, the donor community, and other developmental experts wishing to implement an intervention to support and strengthen women growth-oriented entrepreneurs. It is specifically geared to practitioners wishing to improve their understanding of challenges specific to women entrepreneurs and practical ways of addressing these.

Using data collected from microenterprises in Gaborone, Botswana, this paper finds that women who cross over into male dominated sectors make higher profits and grow larger firms in terms of number of employees compared to women who operate businesses in female-concentrated sectors.