One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Just released! Gender Equity and the World Bank Group: A Post-Beijing Assessment, a collaborative effort of 50 Years Is Enough and the Women's Eyes on the World Bank Campaign. The report analyzes the effectiveness of a wide variety of World Bank tools, programs and policies for "mainstreaming" gender across sectors and loan types.

The authors found that despite heightened rhetoric and more attention paid to gender at the Bank, there is very little progress on changing operations to ensure that the Bank meets women's needs. This is due in part to the fact that the Bank lacks a conceptual framework for adequately integrating gender considerations, and that it has yet to adopt equity and sustainability as goals. For each problem area identified, the report includes recommended operational responses, including internal monitoring and accountability mechanisms and specific information disclosure and dissemination requirements.

Information and analysis from 50 Years Is Enough staff and members (i.e. the Institute for Policy Studies, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Friends of the Earth, and The Development GAP) contributed to the broad analysis of the report. For example:

Between 1994 and 1996, the Bank provided over US$ 8 billion in transportation loans (it lent $10 billion for education and health programs). World Bank transport planners do not examine how the differences in women's and men's income levels, social and economic roles, and rates of participation in the formal and informal sectors affect their transportation needs, however. Thus, lending for transportation projects and policy has tended to skew transportation resources away from women and failed to increase their mobility.

Since July 1992, the World Bank Group has committed over $9.4 billion in loans, credits, guarantees, equity and other forms of financing to fossil fuel projects, with another $4.1 billion on the way. Unfortunately, few of the poorest of the poor — of which women are the majority — share in the vast wealth and fuel power generated by these projects. Indeed, it is estimated that less than 9 percent of overall World Bank energy lending has gone to serve the 2 billion of the world's poorest people living largely in rural areas and dependent on increasingly scarce fuelwood, crop waste and animal dung for their fuel needs. The Bank's energy planners continue to ignore the gender dimensions of the crisis.

Support to the private sector is the fastest growing component of World Bank lending. In 1996 alone, it accounted for nearly 40 percent of the institution's lending. Much of this lending supports the privatization of state-owned industries and services, and is considered "exempt" from World Bank policies and guidelines vis-a-vis participation and the mainstreaming of gender concerns.

The World Bank's 1996 Gender Progress Report acknowledges that "women and men are affected differently by poverty and the policies and programs to reduce poverty", yet it continues to design structural adjustment programs with no underlying gender analysis and no participation of men and women. Indeed, the majority of policies and projects supported by these funds were designed without the benefit of a even a cursory gender analysis and without women's participation.

The report documents the changes that are needed at the conceptual, policy, project, staff, managements and operational level. Included in the recommendations made in the report are that the World Bank must:

develop, in consultation with civil society, academics and outside experts, a conceptual framework for the integration of gender into all aspects of it work that addresses equity and sustainability concerns as primary goals of the Bank. This will require that the Bank fully address the shortcomings of the theoretical underpinnings of the Bank's current macroeconomic policy reform, which currently does not integrate women's and men's paid and unpaid work in the economy, the sexual division of labor, and gender discrimination;

For copies of the report, send $5.00 to 50 Years Is Enough, 1247 E Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003.