Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity

As Pakistan's young activist Malala Yousafzai said of herself and her peers during our conversation at the World Bank Group in 2013, 'We spoke, we wrote, we raised our voices' through the media. 'We spoke and we achieved our goal. Girls are going back to school and are allowed to go to the market.'" - Jim Yong Kim

Grounded in the conviction that social norms can and do change, this report identifies opportunities and entry points for transformation with regard to the gender equality agenda, such as interventions that reach across sectors and include life-skills training, sexual and reproductive health education, and mentoring.

This World Bank Group report draws on 14 thematic and country papers, informed by consultations held since December 2012 in venues ranging from Managua, Nicaragua, to Kathmandu, Nepal. The purpose was to meet the goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity, which the World Bank says "demand[s] no less than the full and equal participation of women and men, girls and boys, around the world. Despite recent advances in important aspects of the lives of girls and women, pervasive challenges remain, frequently as a result of widespread deprivations and constraints. These often violate women's most basic rights and are magnified and multiplied by poverty and lack of education." This report distills the findings from studies that shed light on constraints facing women and girls worldwide - from epidemic levels of gender-based violence to biased laws and norms that prevent them from owning property, working, and making decisions about their own lives.

In the overview section of the report, the reader learns that, by ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), in 1979, 188 states committed to advancing gender equality. The 1995 Beijing Platform of Action and various United Nations Security Council resolutions support benchmarks such as the recognition of women's right to sexual and reproductive health, the right to be free from gender-based violence, and equal rights for women and men to access and control land. According to the report, in order to ensure that all people have the opportunity to realise their potential and participate fully in all aspects of life, this requires agency: "the capacity to make decisions about one's own life and act on them to achieve a desired outcome, free of violence, retribution, or fear. Agency is sometimes defined as 'empowerment.'"

This book is designed to advance the agenda by examining and helping to understand the facts - e.g., across 18 of the 20 countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage, girls with no education were up to 6 times more likely to marry than girls with high school education - while systematically documenting where evidence is lacking and by presenting new evidence that allows comparisons across communities, countries, and regions of the world. It examines how change can come about, identifies policies and programmes that have worked to increase agency, and highlights promising future options.

Among the findings: addressing what the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified as an epidemic of violence against women means scaling up engagement with men and boys. For example, in Australia, the Male Champions of Change initiative works with male chief executive officers and leaders throughout business and the federal government to push for significant and sustainable increases in the representation of women in leadership. Similarly, promoting awareness of progressive laws can help stimulate changes in norms and behaviour. Evidence across eight countries, for example, found that men who were aware of laws addressing violence against women were nearly 50% more likely to prevent a stranger's act of violence.

The role of broadcast media - television and radio - is highlighted as a powerful tool for changing social norms and enhancing women's agency. "In rural areas, where television may be less accessible, radio programming can support social norm change, empower women, and increase their access to information and their connection to social support networks. For example: In Mozambique, research suggests that around 95 percent of women listen to community radio and that the programs they listen to provide information on a broad range of topics such as HIV/AIDS and children's health (Macueve et al. 2009). The programs reduce the feeling of isolation for women in an often physically sparse environment and provide valuable information to them in their own language, empowering them to deal with issues within their family and community....In postgenocide Rwanda, radio programming designed to challenge social norms of deference to authority had substantial impacts in terms of increasing willingness to express dissent and reducing the likelihood of listeners deferring to local officials when solving local problems (Paluk and Green 2009)."

Throughout the entire report, but in Chapter 6 in particular, the report also underlines the vital role information and communication technologies (ICTs) can play in amplifying women's voices, expanding their economic and learning opportunities, and broadening their views and aspirations. To cite only one example, internet-based tools such as Internet Resources and Information for Safety (IRIS) and a smartphone app (MyPlan) aim to increase safety-seeking behaviours by reducing gender-based violence survivors' decisional conflict about safety in their relationship. "[P]reliminary findings are promising, showing that after even just one use, survivors have greater clarity about where and how to seek help and less uncertainty about doing so."

Face-to-face communication also plays a role in enhancing agency, according to examples presented in the report. For instance, in Côte d'Ivoire, a group savings intervention combined with "gender dialogue groups" led to "significant reductions in women's reports of economic abuse and their acceptance of wife beating compared with women who participated in only group savings meetings (Gupta et al. 2013). Women who attended more than 75 percent of sessions with their male partner were also less likely to report physical IPV [interpersonal violence]. In Uganda, a vocational training program - paired with safe spaces for young women's interactions and information on health and risky behaviors - reduced the share of young women experiencing forced sex from 21 percent to nearly zero, while also increasing engagement in income-generating activities by 35 percent (Bandiera et al. 2012)."

Chapter 7 focuses explicitly on data and evidence. It first takes stock of current efforts to measure women's agency, such as internationally agreed-upon gender indicators. Various text boxes outline these indicators, with specific examples of World Bank Group project indicators related to women's agency among them. One text box explains a process of developing indicators: In 2003, the Honduras Land Administration Program (Programa de Administración de Tierras de Honduras, or PATH) was launched to address gaps in formalisation of property rights, promote a more dynamic land market, increase investments in land, and reduce social instability resulting from conflict over land. At that time, about 30% of the country's land was registered, of which women owned less than 13%. A World Bank Group-supported gender audit revealed that despite provisions allowing for joint titling, few women were named on a land title. The audit identified 3 primary constraints: limited awareness of legal rights among women and land administration personnel; land registries and other municipal offices that lacked capacity and procedural guidance on ways to implement the laws; and social norms that dictated that men were the head of household, thereby resulting in titling in their names alone. To address these gaps, PATH held almost a dozen stakeholder workshops in different municipalities. Participants included local authorities, community leaders, and representatives from indigenous peoples' organisations. The resulting gender strategy employed the following: (i) The guiding documents and instruments were revised so that implementation included specific objectives for strengthening women's access to land. (ii) A media campaign, including a radio programme on the gender situation of women in indigenous communications, was initiated, with materials designed to reach men and women of all ages to convey clear messages on the importance of land titling and ways to use titles to advance economic opportunities. (iii) Project indicators were strengthened to include joint titling. The revised results and monitoring framework includes such targets as 30% of new titles to include women and 25% of individuals receiving training in alternative dispute resolution and in territorial planning and natural resource management to be women.

This seventh chapter then highlights key gaps that must be addressed to ensure a robust evidence base to inform policy making and finally outlines priorities for future investment to address these gaps. The report closes with a chart of the World Bank indicators related to women's agency (Table 7.3) and examples of these indicators (Box 7.5).

"The World Bank Group's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity demand no less than the full and equal participation of women and men, girls and boys, around the world."