Beyond the Tag: Prioritizing Impact in Gender Equality Initiatives at the World Bank and IFC

The World Bank and IFC have expanded gender-relevant projects across sectors, emphasizing quantity over depth, with many projects meeting tagging requirements but lacking transformative impact. The new FY24–30 strategy aims to shift focus toward more meaningful, context-specific gender equality outcomes.

The World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, have made considerable progress in addressing gender inequalities through their projects over the past decade, primarily influenced by the framework established in the World Development Report 2012 and the FY16–23 gender strategy. This evaluation, conducted by the Independent Evaluation Group, highlights key achievements and areas for improvement as the World Bank and IFC transition to the newly implemented FY24–30 gender strategy. Since the initial push, the share of gender-relevant projects has increased, especially since the adoption of the FY16–23 strategy, reaching across World Bank sectors and most IFC industries. The evaluation shows that the overall engagement has expanded in both the quantity of gender-relevant projects and the number of sectors involved, moving beyond traditional areas like health and education into fields like infrastructure and finance. However, the expansion has generally favored breadth over depth, with a stronger focus on achieving a higher number of gender-tagged projects rather than on ensuring the transformative quality of gender-focused interventions.

From Awareness to Impact: How Gender Tagging Works

For example, gender tags, initially designed to guarantee meaningful gender integration in projects, have sometimes led to a focus on meeting quotas rather than pursuing substantial impacts. While the gender tagging and flagging systems are seen as effective in raising awareness, their implementation occasionally focuses more on compliance rather than enabling meaningful and lasting gender equality outcomes. The evaluation reveals that almost all World Bank projects now include some gender-relevant components, with IFC showing significant gains as well, especially in its advisory projects. In the World Bank’s case, most gender-relevant projects are categorized with low to moderate scores in gender intensity, meaning they integrate gender-related aspects to varying degrees. Projects with higher scores, which tend to have stronger theories of change and are designed with specific outcomes related to gender equality in mind, remain a minority. Projects in this category are often aimed at addressing deep-rooted gender disparities and are more likely to be gender-transformative. However, even in gender stand-alone projects those with objectives explicitly targeting gender inequality nearly half do not fully incorporate transformative elements. This points to a trend where projects address certain aspects of gender equality, such as access to resources, but often stop short of tackling issues like gender norms or collective agency, which are necessary to achieve lasting, transformative change.

Balancing Breadth and Depth in Gender-Focused Projects

Furthermore, although the World Bank and IFC have increased their focus on gender, the projects often lack a country-level strategy that would enable a unified approach to gender equality within specific countries. This fragmented approach risks diluting the impact of individual projects, which can be undermined by a lack of coordination between sectors and institutions within the Bank Group, as well as with country-level stakeholders. IFC's approach to gender equality in advisory services demonstrates a somewhat different trend. Fewer projects are gender-relevant overall, but those that tend to have stronger, higher-impact designs, particularly in areas like financial access, employment, and training. IFC has managed to build a more selective and effective portfolio within its advisory projects by setting a target of only 30 percent for gender flagging, thereby focusing on fewer, more impactful gender initiatives. In contrast, IFC’s investment projects, especially outside the financial sector, face more challenges. Limited resources and capacity, a lack of sex-disaggregated data, and an often unclear business case for clients make it difficult to integrate gender considerations into investment decisions. Thus, while IFC has seen notable success in its advisory projects, its investment projects have been less successful in fully incorporating gender relevance, a problem compounded by the pressure to meet increasing gender flagging targets without commensurate resources or capacity.

The Challenge of Intersectionality in Gender Projects

Another critical issue highlighted in the evaluation is the treatment of intersectionality within gender-relevant projects. Although projects frequently aim to address gender disparities, they often treat women as a homogeneous group, overlooking the diverse needs and forms of discrimination faced by women from different backgrounds, such as age, ethnicity, and disability. Only about a quarter of World Bank gender stand-alone projects consider intersectionality, with issues like poverty and age receiving the most attention. IFC projects also largely overlook these intersectional differences, focusing primarily on economic factors like income level or rural location but often neglecting factors like ethnicity or age. The Latin America and Caribbean region shows some positive examples, such as IFC-supported projects in Colombia and Peru that address the specific needs of migrant women by redesigning lending products and addressing cultural biases through capacity building. Nevertheless, the overall lack of intersectional analysis limits the ability of these projects to comprehensively address the diverse challenges faced by women from different social groups.

Moving Beyond Compliance: Prioritizing Impact on Gender Tags

The findings suggest that while the Bank Group has made progress in addressing gender inequality, there remains a need to enhance the quality and transformative power of its gender-relevant projects. Moving forward, the new FY24–30 gender strategy places greater emphasis on context-specific approaches and encourages deeper, more impactful engagement in addressing root causes of gender inequality at the country level. The evaluation recommends shifting the focus of gender tagging and flagging systems to prioritize impact rather than compliance, fostering a more strategic approach to achieving gender equality outcomes. Additionally, enhancing the consistency of monitoring and evaluation to better track and measure gender impacts will be crucial to understanding the progress and effectiveness of the World Bank and IFC's gender strategies.

Ultimately, this evaluation underscores the importance of not only increasing the quantity of gender-relevant projects but also ensuring they are designed and implemented with the depth and strategic focus needed to achieve real and lasting change.