1. What is the World Bank's Current Direction Regarding Gender and
Development?

Interview with Karen Mason, Director of Gender and Development at the World
Bank. In her interview, Ms. Mason discusses the Bank's new gender strategy
"Integrating Gender into the World Bank's Work: A Strategy for Action." The
strategy can be found online on the Bank's website at www.worldbank.org.

Can you give me an overview of the strategy?

The Bank's new gender mainstreaming strategy emphasizes the need to
determine
priority actions on a country by country basis, with the country taking
leadership. In the past, the Bank has had a very large girls' education
program, but there are many countries in Latin America, East Asia and
elsewhere where the gender gap in school enrollment is not particularly
large
and some countries where enrollments are higher among girls than among boys.
In these countries, however, there are other gender-related issues that are
important. So, the strategy prescribes a country-led and country-specific
process.

One of the Bank's comparative advantages is that we do good research. For
this reason, a central feature of the strategy is the Bank's responsibility
for ensuring that a country gender assessment is done in each country where
we have an active lending program. This assessment will look very broadly
at
the gender situation in the country and will identify the critical entry
points for gender-related actions from the perspective of poverty reduction
and sustainable development. In this regard, it's important to note that
the
Bank's mission is economic development and poverty reduction rather than
promoting gender equality per se. A report we issued last year,
"Engendering Development-Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and
Voice," showed very clearly, however, that gender inequality is bad for
poverty reduction and development. Hence, promoting gender equality is
central to our work, even if not our official mission.

Will the Bank usually be undertaking the country gender assessments?

In many countries, especially those with serious capacity and data issues,
the Bank is likely to conduct the country gender assessment. But in other
countries, gender assessments have been done in partnership with government
agencies and civil society organizations. Ideally, these assessments should
have a consultative aspect that includes a variety of stakeholders,
including
members of civil society and women's NGOs.

Does the strategy have elements other than a country gender assessment?

Yes, definitely, the goal is to take action, not just do analysis. The
strategy basically says that, in a given borrower country, the Bank's
Country
Director has the responsibility to use the assessment in dialogue with
government in order to come up with a country-specific set of actions.
Although there's no requirement that there must be actions, it's our
responsibility to bring the findings from the assessment to the government's
attention and be proactive about discussing with them what potential high-
payoff actions could be. We'll be monitoring that follow-up.

The strategy also stipulates that, if the country gender assessment
identifies certain sectors as having particularly important gender issues,
then Bank lending in that sector should be done in a gender-responsive
manner. For example, in many sub-Saharan Africa countries, women are the
predominant agriculturalists and main suppliers of food to family, but
frequently get fewer resources to practice their agriculture than men
receive. This reduces total agricultural productivity. So in a country
where
this is true, any lending the Bank does in the agricultural sector should
ensure that the needs of both women and men farmers are met. This approach
has been called a selective or strategic mainstreaming approach. Instead of
declaring that all our projects should have an explicit gender focus, we
will
target gender mainstreaming to those areas that the country gender
assessment
has identified as important sectors.

What were some of the competing interests or viewpoints you had to
accommodate in developing the strategy?

We have an external Gender Consultative Group with members from civil
society
around the world. Some members of this group felt that the Bank should have
a "safeguard" policy that ensures gender mainstreaming in all Bank projects.
On the other hand, we have some borrowing countries that view a requirement
to pay attention to gender issues in all projects as a tax they cannot
afford. We had to craft an approach that was in between these two extremes.
We'd want to encourage countries to pay attention to gender equality because
it's so important for human well-being and poverty reduction. But trying to
force attention usually results in little more than lip service without any
real change on the ground. We want countries to have serious buy-in and do
something, not just say they will to comply with a World Bank policy.

How does this strategy differ from what the Bank would have done in the
past?

It's basically formalized some of what's been done in the past. Selective
mainstreaming has been going on for some time now. There also have been
country gender assessments done in some countries. What's changed is that
these are no longer optional. The strategy is designed to make the Bank's
attention to gender issues more systematic and government choices more
rational.

One of the criticisms from NGOs of the World Bank revolves around the impact
of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) on women. Does this new strategy
allow for questioning the validity of SAPs to be integrated into the Bank's
programming?

Well, the new strategy does not require the Bank's program in any country to
follow a particular path and puts the government in the driver's seat, so I
supposed the answer to your question would be yes. Perhaps it's more
relevant
to note that the Policy Research Report we published in 2001, "Engendering
Development--Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice",
examined the issue of the differential impact of structural adjustment
programs on women and men quite carefully. Although the lower average
resources controlled by poor women than by poor men means that certain
features of some SAPs, for example, user fees, can have a greater impact on
the women than on men, in general, the evidence about the impact of SAPs on
women versus men is mixed. It's important to ask what would have happened to
women (and men) had there been no SAP in a country, not just to look at what
did happen and conclude that it was the result of the SAP. And when that's
done, the picture is quite complicated, with both "winners" and "losers" on
both sides of the gender divide. It's also important to note that the World
Bank has changed the way it does SAPs. We now require governments to
maintain
basic social services--they can not "adjust" their economies by removing
these services--and we are instituting a social and economic impact analysis
in advance of lending for structural adjustment that identifies where and
for
whom harmful effects may occur, so that the adjustment program can be
designed to avoid or mitigate these harmful effects. For example, in
Vietnam,
our research showed that the way in which workers are compensated when
public
sector organizations are closed has very different implications for women
and
men. So the newest round of public sector closures that the government of
Vietnam has decided to institute will use a compensation package that mixes
the types of compensation that are best for women and best for men, so that
women's benefits are as good as men's.

How much of the Bank's resources are being put into the country gender
assessments?

This fiscal year, it's about $2.5 million dollars. We're developing a
monitoring and evaluation system for the strategy, so that we can track how
well we are implementing it. Part of the monitoring will be a year-end
report on how many country gender assessments were completed during the
year.

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