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Request for Expressions of Interest: Seeking organizations and teams with projects in Africa designed to improve economic opportunities for men and women
Gender Innovation Lab of the World Bank’s Africa Region Gender Practice

Deadline: 8 July 2013 (5pm US Eastern Daylight Time)

Find out more - Download the following:
- Full Request for Expressions of Interest - MS Word version - (79KB)
- Full Request for Expressions of Interest - Acrobat PDF version - (220KB)
- Project brief - Gender Innovation Lab - Acrobat PDF version - (474KB)
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If your organization or team has been wanting to do – or to have someone else do – a rigorous impact evaluation of your work, and/or develop gender innovative programming, this opportunity is for you.

This request for expressions of interest (EOIs) is for organizations and project teams who would like to work with the Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) on impact evaluations of their projects.

Our focus is exclusively on Sub-Saharan Africa, and is also exclusively on programs that aim to increase women’s, or men and women’s, agricultural productivity, entrepreneurship, employment, and economic voice and empowerment.

With financial support from the UK Department for International Development (DFID), GIL is issuing this call for Expressions of Interest to identify and select up to 14 project teams. Selected project teams will work with GIL’s impact evaluation and gender experts, and outside researchers, to design and carry out an impact evaluation of their project and to develop gender innovative programming; receive financial support for all or part of the impact evaluation’s data collection costs; and will have the opportunity to apply for a small amount of funding to support the implementation of an innovative intervention targeting gender issues.

1. Background

In partnership with units across the World Bank, aid agencies and donors, governments, non-governmental organizations, private sector firms, and researchers, GIL carries out rigorous impact evaluations and designs gender-innovative interventions in the areas of agricultural productivity, entrepreneurship, employment, and economic empowerment, in Africa. GIL aims to build the evidence base on how to close the gender gap in earnings, productivity, assets, property rights, and agency.

GIL’s aim is to increase take-up of effective policies and programs that can address the underlying causes of gender inequality in Africa. GIL aims to do this by producing and delivering a new body of evidence on what does and does not work in promoting gender equality, to decision-makers in both governments and the private sector. This new evidence will deepen capacity for gender-informed policy-making, and will help guide investments and policymaking towards supporting effective programs and policies that promote women’s economic and social empowerment.

The existing body of evidence, synthesized in the 2012 World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR), which focused on gender and equality, does a good job of laying out women’s underlying and primary constraints. Following on this, the next step is to develop and test practical interventions and policy solutions for alleviating these constraints. This will involve tweaking existing interventions to enhance their effectiveness, testing whether interventions successful in one setting are similarly successful when replicated in a new setting, establishing the comparative cost effectiveness of competing interventions, and, when needed, coming up with new interventions. GIL’s work places a particular focus on the underlying causes of “sticky” domains of gender inequality that persist even in the presence of economic growth, including constraints in the domains of markets, institutions, and households, which limit women’s achievement in terms of economic opportunities, agency, and endowments.

All GIL impact evaluations are collaborations between project teams that have a project they would like to test, external researchers who are interested in the research question, and Lab staff who have significant impact evaluation, sectoral, regional, and gender expertise. Since its founding, GIL has undertaken more than 20 impact evaluations.

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