Word Banks says: WOMEN KEY TO EFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT

[mki]

Circulated by Lesley Abdela's office (tel. +44 1892 891 106) in the
hope this new World Bank release will be of  interest -


WOMEN KEY TO EFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT
World Bank Issues New Press Backgrounder

WASHINGTON, December 6, 2001--Unfolding events in
Afghanistan have brought worldwide attention to the severe
treatment of women under the Taliban.  As the Afghan people
prepare to rebuild their country, and as they explore ways to
include women in this process, World Bank experts say that
countries which promote women's rights and increase their access
to resources and schooling enjoy lower poverty rates, faster
economic growth and less corruption than countries that do not.

Gender inequality hurts all members of society, not just girls and
women. World Bank research--including an in-depth report
released earlier this year called Engendering Development shows
that countries with smaller gaps between women and men in areas
such as education, employment, and property rights not only have
lower child malnutrition and mortality they also have more
transparent business and government and faster economic growth,
which in turn helps to further narrow the gender gap.

"Increasing gender equality is central to the idea of development as
freedom, of expanding the choices and control that people have
over their lives," says Nicholas Stern,  World  Bank  Chief
Economist  and  Senior Vice President for Development
Economics. "The evidence shows that education, health,
productivity, credit and governance work better when women are
involved."

"Societies that discriminate on the basis of gender pay a significant
price in  greater  poverty,  slower economic growth, weaker
governance, and a lower quality of life,"  says Elizabeth King, Lead
Economist in the Bank's Development Research Group and co-
author of Engendering Development.

In  fact,  research  shows  that countries that reduce gender gaps in
basic rights,  access  to resources, and economic opportunities
achieve more effective Development,  more rapid economic growth,
better governance, and higher levels of  well-being.   The  benefits
of promoting equality between women and men are significant and
wide-ranging.  Some examples:

Productivity and Economic Growth

In Africa, improving rural women's access to productive resources
including    education, land, and fertilizer could increase
agricultural productivity by  as much as one-fifth. In Bangladesh,
microcredit provided to women has higher returns in terms of
raising household consumption (income) than the same credit
provided to men. Cross-country studies suggest that if the Middle
East and North Africa, South  Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa had
been as successful as East Asia in narrowing the gender gap in
education during 1960-1990, GNP per capita in those regions
would have grown by 0.5 and 0.9 percentage points higher per
year,  substantial increases over actual rates.

Governance

Cross-country studies show that where women have greater rights
and play a greater role in public life, levels of corruption in
government are lower. In the republic of Georgia firms owned or
managed by women are significantly  less likely to make unofficial
payments to government officials than those  owned or managed by
men.

Well-Being

Greater equality in education between women and men means
healthier families. If African women and men had more equal
schooling, child mortality would have been 25% lower than it was in
1990. A cross-country study of 63 countries finds that gains in
women's education made the single largest contribution to declines
in malnutrition in 1970-95, accounting for 43% of the total. Smaller
gender gaps in literacy translate into lower HIV infection rates,
even after accounting for the effects of per capita income and other
factors known to affect HIV prevalence. Women's income, not just
education matters.  In Brazil, income in the hands of mothers has
four times the impact on child nutrition than the same income in the
hands of fathers. Similar patterns are seen in such diverse
countries as Bangladesh and Côte d'Ivoire.

Overall, girls and women have made significant progress in recent
decades. For example, over the past 25 years girls' primary school
enrollment rates doubled in the Middle East, South Asia, and Sub-
Saharan Africa. And in the past half-century, women's life
expectancy has increased by 15-20 years in developing countries.

Despite this progress, however, women worldwide continue to have
fewer rights and less control over important resources than men. In
South Asia, women have only about half as many years of
education as men, and female secondary school  enrollment  rates
are only two-thirds of male rates. Control of land and of other forms
of capital is also highly unequal. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa,
women  have limited rights to own land, even though they are the
major producers of  food  crops.   And  several  countries  around
the world, women still cannot travel outside the home or transact
business without their husbands' consent.

"Experiences  from  cross-country  analysis  and  case  studies
show that economic  development and institutional change are both
necessary to improve the status  of  women." says Andrew Mason,
Senior Economist in the Bank's Gender and Development  Group
and co-author of Engendering Development. "Societies progress
more rapidly if they also adopt specific measures to narrow gender
gaps."

Many ongoing World Bank efforts aim to help reduce gender
inequality through the programs and projects it supports in
developing countries, including:

Education. Since the Fourth World Conference on Women in
Beijing in 1995, World Bank lending for girls' education has totalled
approximately US$5.3 billion. The Bank's girls' education programs
give special emphasis to countries where primary enrolments are
low and/or gender disparities in primary and basic enrolment rates
are large. Health, nutrition and population. To date the World Bank
has lent more than $4 billion to support population and
reproductive health activities throughout the world and is the
world's largest external funder of health programs. In 1999, two
thirds of the loans in these areas included actions aimed at
promoting gender equality. Credit and savings. The Bank is
integrating credit and savings programs that  cater to women's
needs into its projects in many sectors; and it is working  with
partners to strengthen microfinance programs. The Pakistan
Poverty Alleviation Fund, for example, includes a microfinance
component that targets  poor women. Legal rights.  The Bank is
increasingly emphasizing the role of legal and regulatory systems
in protecting women from exclusion and discrimination, especially
through initiatives designed to assess the status of women and
promote women's access to justice and legal services. Post-conflict
reconstruction. The Post-Conflict Fund (PCF) supports planning,
analysis of reconstruction activities, and pilot programs by funding
governments and other partners working on post-conflict
reconstruction.  The PCF is funding the Afghan Female Teachers
In-Service Training project in Peshawar, Pakistan, for example, to
train female teachers in the Afghan University, attended by the
Afghan refugee community.

For more on the World Bank's work on gender issues, including a
summary Engendering Development, click here:
http://www.worldbank.org/gender/

Updated December, 2001