Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity

Voice and Agency

Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity

Jeni Klugman, Lucia Hanmer, Sarah Twigg, Tazeen Hasan, Jennifer McCleary-Sills, Julieth Santamaria

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Attribution—Please cite the work as follows: Klugman, Jeni, Lucia Hanmer, Sarah Twigg, Tazeen Hasan, Jennifer McCleary-Sills, and Julieth Santamaria. 2014. Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0359-8. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 IGO

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ISBN (paper): 978-1-4648-0359-8

ISBN (electronic): 978-1-4648-0360-4

DOI: 10.1596/978-1-4648-0359-8

Design: Miki Fernández/ULTRAdesigns, Inc.

Cover design: Bill Pragluski, Critical Stages, LLC.

Cover photo: A woman raises her hand to speak at a community meeting in Aurangabad, India. © Simone D. McCourtie/World Bank. Used with permission, further permission required for reuse.

Additional photos: Used with permission, further permission required for reuse.

Overview: High school students in La Ceja, Department of Antioquía, Colombia. © Charlotte Kesl/World Bank.

Chapter 1: A group of women play soccer; Vila Da Canoas in the Amazon region of Brazil, near Manaus. © Julio Pantoja/World Bank.

Chapter 2: Women’s empowerment workshop, Nepal. © Mary Ellsberg.

Chapter 3: Many residents of Delmas 32, a neighborhood in Haiti, are beneficiaries of the PRODEPUR-Habitat project. The neighborhood now has electricity until 11 p.m. with new improvements to sidewalks and homes. © Dominic Chavez/World Bank.

Chapter 4: A young boy smiles at the camera as his mother holds him, Nepal. © Aisha Faquir/World Bank.

Chapter 5: Woman in doorway, India. © Curt Carnemark/World Bank.

Chapter 6: Women’s group, Kenya. © Curt Carnemark/World Bank.

Chapter 7: Mumbai, India. © Simone D. McCourtie/World Bank.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klugman, Jeni, 1964-

Voice and agency: empowering women and girls for shared prosperity / Jeni Klugman, Lucia Hanmer, Sarah Twigg, Tazeen Hasan, Jennifer McCleary-Sills, Julieth Santamaria.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4648-0359-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4648-0360-4 (electronic: alk. paper)

1. Women—Developing countries—Economic conditions. 2. Women--Developing countries—Social conditions. 3. Women’s rights—Developing countries. 4. Economic development—Developing countries. I. World Bank. II. Title.

HQ1870.9.K62 2014

305.409172’4—dc23

2014026059

Contents

BOXES

FIGURES

MAPS

TABLES

Foreword

Our flagship World Development Report 2012 demonstrated that gender equality and economic development are inextricably linked. It showed that equality not only guarantees basic rights but also plays a vital role in promoting the robust, shared growth needed to end extreme poverty in our increasingly competitive, globalized world. The persistent constraints and deprivations that prevent many of the world’s women from achieving their potential have huge consequences for individuals, families, communities, and nations. The 2012 report recognized that expanding women’s agency—their ability to make decisions and take advantage of opportunities—is key to improving their lives as well as the world we all share.

Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity represents a major advance in global knowledge on this critical front. The vast data and thousands of surveys distilled here cast important light on the nature of constraints women and girls continue to face globally.

As an anthropologist, I especially welcome the report’s focus on social norms, which act as powerful prescriptions for how men and women should behave. Even where women can legally own property, they may not, because those who do become outcasts. Even where girls go to school and take an interest in math, teachers and parents may direct them away from certain studies and jobs for which social norms say boys are better suited. Women then enter a smaller range of jobs with lower barriers to entry, less stability, and lower wages, continuing a vicious circle of inequality. Overwhelmingly, girls and women also perform the unpaid work of caregiving, for which they are often penalized with poverty in old age.

Norms over time may become legalized discrimination, which imposes its own steep economic cost. As the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, laws start by recognizing the relations they find already existing…. Those who had already been compelled to obedience became in this manner legally bound to it. Rightly, he added, what color, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women, their subordinate status often codified by law. Today, in 128 countries, laws in fact treat men and women differently—making it impossible, for example, for a woman to obtain independently an ID card, own or use property, access credit, or get a job. These constraints are fundamentally unjust. They are also economically unwise.

The good news is that social norms can and do change. This report identifies promising opportunities and entry points for lasting transformation, such as interventions that reach across sectors and include life-skills training, sexual and reproductive health education, conditional cash transfers, and mentoring. It finds that addressing what the World Health Organization has identified as an epidemic of violence against women means sharply scaling up engagement with men and boys.

The report also underlines the vital role information and communication technologies can play in amplifying women’s voices, expanding their economic and learning opportunities, and broadening their views and aspirations. 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.

A bold new path toward equality, grounded in fundamental human rights and backed by evidence and data, is long overdue. 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.

The World Bank Group is committed to accelerating and enhancing equality in everything we do and to shining a spotlight on inequality wherever we find it. This report does both. It should inform the global development agenda going forward and advance momentum toward a better future for all.

Jim Yong Kim

President, World Bank Group

Acknowledgments

Background analysis was undertaken by Sarah Haddock, Matthew Morton, Josefina Posadas, Emma Samman, and Sofia Trommlerova, with thanks to Alicia Hammond for technical and editorial contributions. Zuzana Boehmova, Anjali Fleury, Lisa Fry, Sveinung Kiplesund, Nazia Moqueet, Sarah Nedolast, Marie-Anne Nsengiyumva, Milad Pournik, and Shaha Riza provided various inputs.

We are grateful to Caroline Anstey for her support in initiating the work and to the government of Sweden and the Nordic Trust Fund for their financial support. The Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality will support dissemination efforts. TrustLaw Connect of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Serena Grant, in particular, are thanked for supporting several country studies.

The report draws on 14 thematic and country papers, listed in the appendix. It is informed by more than a dozen consultations since December 2012 in venues ranging from Managua, Nicaragua, to Kathmandu, Nepal, and benefited greatly from the collective wisdom and research of our Technical Advisory Group: Gary Barker, Promundo; Lourdes Beneria, Cornell University; Cheryl Doss, Yale University; Mary Ellsberg, George Washington University; Naila Kabeer, London School of Economics; Sunita Kishor, Demographic and Health Surveys; Stephan Klassen, University of Göttingen; Kathleen Kuehnast, U.S. Institute of Peace; Susan Markham, National Democratic Institute; Lori Michau, Raising Voices; Eppu Mikkonen-Jeanneret, HelpAge International; Andrew Morrison, Inter-American Development Bank; Kathleen Newland, Migration Policy Institute; Agnes Quisumbing, International Food Policy Research Institute; Charlotte Watts, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Alicia Yamin, Harvard University; and Lawrence Yanovitch, GSMA Foundation; as well as Sabina Alkire of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and Alison Evans.

The team would also like to acknowledge the advice and support of World Bank Group colleagues, particularly Ana Revenga, Senior Director of the Poverty Global Practice; Luis Benveniste, Louise Cord, Luis-Felipe López-Calva, and Vijayendra Rao, who acted as peer reviewers; Sarah Iqbal and the Women, Business, and the Law team for collaboration; and the World Bank Group’s Gender and Development Board members and others for valuable comments and inputs.

Led by Sarah Jackson-Han, Malcolm Ehrenpreis, Amy Adkins Harris, and Maura Leary provided communications support. Administrative support was provided by Dawn Ballantyne, Maureen Itepu, Ngozi Kalu-Mba, and Mame Niasse.

About the Authors

Lucia Hanmer is a lead economist in gender and development at the World Bank Group. In this capacity since 2013, she works to identify and pursue frontier research areas and develop new knowledge products aimed at filling key data gaps and operationalizing gender equality throughout the World Bank Group portfolio. She worked previously as senior economic adviser for the Economic Empowerment Section at UN Women and senior economic adviser in the chief economist’s office at the U.K. Department for International Development, after serving as country representative for the World Bank Group in Guyana. Before moving into development policy, she was a researcher at the Overseas Development Institute in the United Kingdom and taught economics at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She has worked on growth diagnostics, poverty reduction strategies and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach, and inequality and attainment of the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals, as well as on gender and development. Much of her work has been in Sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge.

Tazeen Hasan is a senior gender specialist at the World Bank Group. She served as a legal specialist for the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development and the World Bank Group report Opening Doors: Gender Equality in the Middle East and North Africa, and she is a coauthor of Empowering Women: Legal Rights and Economic Opportunities in Africa (2013). She worked with the World Bank Group’s Women, Business, and the Law program on a multiregional study analyzing legal rights and their impact on women’s economic empowerment over the past 50 years. She previously practiced as a barrister in the United Kingdom specializing in civil and commercial law and subsequently worked in Kenya as a legal adviser to nongovernmental organizations. She holds a master’s degree in international law from the London School of Economics and a BA in law from the University of Oxford.

Jeni Klugman is a senior adviser at the World Bank Group and fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University. She was director of Gender and Development at the World Bank Group until July 2014, where she acted as lead spokesperson on gender equality issues and developed strategic directions to promote the institution’s gender agenda. She serves on the World Economic Forum’s Advisory Board on Sustainability and Competitiveness and other advisory boards, including those related to the Council on Foreign Relations, Plan International, the International Civil Society Network, the Global Forum on Women in Parliaments, and a European Union research program on GDP and beyond. She previously served as director and lead author of three global Human Development Reports published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP): Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (2009), The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development (2010), and Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All (2011). She has published widely on topics ranging from poverty reduction strategies and labor markets to conflict, health reform, education, and decentralization. She holds a PhD in economics from the Australian National University as well as postgraduate degrees in both law and development economics from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

Jennifer McCleary-Sills is a gender-based violence specialist at the World Bank Group. Her research interests include violence against women, sexual and reproductive health, and the translation of data and evaluations into effective programming. She has published on these topics in Reproductive Health Matters, The Journal of International Women’s Studies, The Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association, and The Journal of Immigrant Health. Prior to joining the Bank, she was a senior social and behavioral scientist with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), where she led the design and implementation of participatory research projects with adolescents and survivors of violence and those living in postconflict communities. She holds honors degrees from Yale University (BA) and the Boston University School of Public Health (MPH) and a PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Julieth Santamaria is a research consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she works on issues related to cost-benefit analyses of early childhood development programs. She worked previously as a consultant at the World Bank Group, where she analyzed gender data for this report. She has also worked at the IDB Integration and Trade division as a research fellow, focusing her research on global value chains. Before moving to the United States, she worked at Universidad del Rosario in Colombia as a research assistant on issues related to competition in the health sector. She holds an MSc in economics from Universidad del Rosario.

Sarah Twigg is a gender and development consultant with the World Bank Group, where she has coordinated new knowledge products and led research on emerging gender and development issues. She worked previously as a gender and climate change specialist at UN Women, where she provided support to government representatives during international climate change negotiations. She served as a research and policy consultant for two UNDP Human Development Reports: The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development (2010) and Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All (2011). She has practiced corporate law with leading international firms in New York and New Zealand. She holds a master’s degree in international politics and business from New York University and bachelor’s degrees in law and international politics from the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Abbreviations

Overview

Why voice and agency?

By ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 188 states have committed to advancing gender equality by confronting any distinction, exclusion, or restriction made on the basis of sex which [impairs] the enjoyment or exercise by women … of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Alongside CEDAW, which came into force in 1979, the 1995 Beijing Platform of Action and various United Nations Security Council resolutions buttress key universally accepted benchmarks. These benchmarks include recognition of women’s right to sexual and reproductive health, the right