Is Gender Being Mainstreamed in Bank's Projects?

Date
Sep 2010
In May 2010, the Bank presented a draft "Operational Policy on Gender Equality in Development" that, if approved, would replace its "Operational Policy on Women in Development" (OP-761). As stated in its draft document, the new Operational Policy intends to overcome a number of challenges that emerged under the current OP-761 Policy and demand urgent attention. One of those challenges is the limited progress made so far in evaluating the results and overall performance of its Gender Equality (GE) interventions. One of the preconditions for evaluating a project's performance is ensuring the availability of the information needed to ascertain how the intervention functioned, from its very beginning through completion. For that purpose, projects need to establish upfront their evaluation criteria, propose indicators with baseline values and define targets and milestones for them. This evaluation seeks to contribute to the enhancement of the Bank's work in the field of GE by examining the gender mainstreaming efforts of 21 projects in addressing these conditions. With that aim, it will focus on the projects' efforts to document the distribution of the benefits that they provide and the projects' effects dis-aggregated by gender.