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DEVELOPMENT: Groups Prod World Bank on Gender

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Jan 21 2004 (IPS) - The World Bank needs to hire more experts on gender equality, press borrowers to include gender issues in its investments, and offer more incentives for its staff to work toward eliminating gaps between men and women worldwide, says a recent study.

It adds that the bank’s 2002 ‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategy’, which outlines its policy towards ending gender inequality, remains a positive work that sorely needs greater commitment from the Washington-based bank and other development agencies.

The study, ‘Reforming the World Bank: Will the New Gender Strategy Make a Difference?’, is among the first to look at the bank’s little-known gender strategy and its efforts to put it to work.

The report does so by comparing the bank’s gender activities to its efforts to address environmental issues.

It was produced by Gender Action, a non-profit advocacy group that lobbies multilateral banks to give greater assistance to women in developing countries, and China Women’s Health Network, both based in Washington, DC.

These groups say they want to see women and men participate in and benefit equally from multilateral investments, the largest public source of development financing in the world.

Gender Action says programmes sponsored by development banks and funds, such as privatisation of state-owned enterprises, rural development and agriculture, and water and sanitation projects, tend to overlook gender gaps or fail to ensure that women’s needs are considered, although 70 percent of the world’s poor are women.

The study, commissioned by Germany’s Heinrich Boell Foundation, demonstrates the little attention the issue gets from the World Bank.

It says the number of gender experts in the institution has grown from only 1 in 1977 to some 115 today, while the team of environmental experts rose from 1 in the early 1980s to roughly more than 700.

Thus, environmental experts constitute roughly seven percent of bank staff and consultants, while those working in gender represent less than one percent, the report concludes.

At the same time, it adds, the core team of 10-12 workers in the World Bank’s gender unit has expanded little since the mid-1980s.

The majority of the bank’s 115 "gender experts" are country-based employees who add responsibility for gender issues to other demanding tasks.

The report adds that while it is compulsory for bank staff to examine the possible environmental impact of every operation, there is no such rule for gender.

"Although environment issues are still not addressed satisfactorily, they receive much deeper attention than do gender gaps," it says.

The vast majority of bank staff that do not work directly on gender issues have never heard of the gender strategy nor looked at the bank’s web pages that provide tools for "engendering" investments and other activities.

According to the report, those employees say they lack the time and incentives to examine the material, and feel overwhelmed by the proliferating number of bank strategies – about 15 – and an ever-growing list of institutional priorities.

The small amount – 600,000 dollars – that the bank spent on an incentive fund to implement its gender strategy in 2002 reflects the low priority the issue commands among bank priorities, it adds.

The World Bank invests roughly 18 billion dollars annually.

According to a case study in the report on China, the bank’s largest client in terms of loans and population, no World Bank activity in the country "seriously addresses gender gaps, despite the timely availability of the ‘China Country Gender Review’."

The report says the bank’s poverty reduction projects in China neglect major gender issues, such as the feminisation of poverty and agriculture, the exploding rate of trafficking in poor rural women and girls and the fact that these groups have the world’s highest female suicide rate.

A bank official says the report is factually correct but that it addresses these issues out of context.

"If the bank was about doing work on gender as a primary goal, it would probably be right on target. But that’s not the case à it’s an issue of being out of context vis-à-vis whatever else the bank is doing," added the official, who asked to remain unnamed.

It is easier for both the bank and borrowing countries to work on environmental issues, for example, than on gender issues, which require strong will from a borrowing government to overcome such things as cultural sensitivities, added the official.

"It’s much easier for a government in country X to accept that it has to be careful with the environment, with the air or with water than it is that they should give more rights to women."

The bank official said other parties, like the World Bank’s donor countries, are responsible because they are devoting fewer resources to gender issues.

Gender Action President Elaine Zuckerman countered the official’s critique.

The report, she told IPS, "is not out of context because our particular terms of reference and framework was to evaluate the bank strategy; it wasn’t to go around the world and check out the recipient-donor country context".

"They (bank officials) have been trying to win the hearts and the minds of staff on gender equality, or gender mainstreaming as the bank calls it, but it’s always been through a hearts-and-minds strategy and not through mandates, like (for) the environment," added Zuckerman.