Using Gender-Sensitive Strategies to Enhance Outcomes for Women
Gender matters in DRFI because gender differences – in terms of access to financial protection – affect women’s and men’s resilience and capacity to recover from climate-related external shocks. Implementing programs that help address gender differences and assessing progress towards reducing those differences will improve DRFI outcomes for women. Significant evidence shows women tend to experience the negative consequences of disasters more acutely and disproportionally and have less access to financial resources than men, impeding their capacity to cope with and recover from shocks. Despite this, women are powerful agents of change: they are often first responders in their communities to disaster impacts, and leaders in humanitarian action.
The Global Shield Financing Facility (GSFF) systematically addresses DRFI-related gender differences and gaps in the initiatives that it finances, employing gender-sensitive methodologies to enhance outcomes for women in disaster preparedness and recovery and ensuring that gender-neutral activities do not inadvertently disadvantage women. Activities implemented by the World Bank with GSFF funding undergo a corporate and grant-level gender screening process.
GSFF’s commitment to integrating gender-sensitive approaches into DRFI efforts is guided by a Gender Strategy with four priorities:
1. Embedding Gender Considerations in Systems and Processes: Gender considerations are systematically integrated into GSFF's project design, approval, implementation, and result monitoring processes, ensuring that gender is considered throughout the project cycle.
2. Increasing Gender Knowledge and Capacity: By connecting to gender-focused resources, experts, and knowledge, World Bank DRFI teams will be better equipped to design and implement project activities that will contribute to closing gender gaps.
3. Forging Collaborative Partnerships: GSFF aspires to establish robust partnerships with humanitarian and civil society organizations. Collaborating with these entities contributes expertise and operational capacity and increases reach and impact, particularly for women.
4. Contributing to Global Public Goods: By actively contributing to developing global public resources and sharing innovative good practices and insights, GSFF aims to contribute to more gender-sensitive DRFI interventions worldwide, benefiting more people with better targeted actions leading to more sustainable results.
GSFF is paving the way for more gender-sensitive approaches to DRFI by making available products and tools that help practitioners inside and outside the World Bank consider and incorporate gender dimensions into DRFI policies and programs. Recent publications include [add the two case studies, with links; and the Guide], and the development of further resources is underway. A standardized gender training on Disaster Risk Finance has been developed and piloted through the Financial Protection Academy. The GSFF team is also establishing internal and external partnerships to help increase knowledge creation and exchange.
Ultimately, the goal is to deliver progress on gender equality in DRFI on the ground. To date, GSFF grants have supported women in:
Malawi: Most of the beneficiaries under Scalability Mechanisms are female.
Jamaica: 1.43 of 2.8 million beneficiaries are female.
Lesotho: 200k of 400k beneficiaries are female. The project is expected to support 20,000 African MSMEs, of which > 50% must be women-owned.
Morocco: 15 of 30 million beneficiaries are female.
Bangladesh: 200k of 400k beneficiaries are female.
DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo): 450k of 1 million beneficiaries are women.
Horn of Africa (DRIVE): 57% percent of issued insurance policies in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia are held by women who are the head of household; they now also have digital savings accounts.