An Operational Approach to Enhancing Women's and Girls' Empowerment in World Bank Projects

Gender equality has long been central to the World Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. More recently, women's and girls' empowerment (WGE) has become a priority in the Africa region in the context of the region's demographic transition. There has been a proliferation of World Bank projects with development objectives that include "empowerment", yet there remains a lack of consensus around its definition and operationalization. This note lays out a pragmatic Operational Approach to enhancing women's and girls' empowerment in World Bank projects. It is not intended to provide a new definition of empowerment or to present a new framework. Instead, the objective of the note is to translate widely accepted empowerment concepts into an operational approach to WGE that Bank Task Team Leaders (TTLs) can use in their project and ASA work. The approach includes: (i) a systematic way to analyze constraints to achieving WGE in the context of lending or analytical products; (ii) a list of potential intervention areas within the three empowerment pillars that can be integrated into World Bank projects; and (iii) guidance on how to incorporate the operational approach to WGE into project design