Partnering With The World Bank To Secure Equality for Women

Corruption undermines the rights of women. It involves not only extortion for cash, but often extortion for sex. Now, the World Bank has a unique opportunity to make a major constructive difference.

FRANK VOGL

Background notes for the August 27, 2024 UNCAC Coalition Civil Society meeting on the WORLD BANK GROUP GENDER STRATEGY 2024–2030 – Accelerate Gender Equality to End Poverty on a Livable Planet.

The core team was led by Laura Rawlings (Lead Economist, Gender, WB).

The new strategy prioritizes three strategic objectives:

1.     end gender-based violence and elevate human capital,

2.     expand and enable economic opportunities, and

3.     engage women as leaders.

These notes respond, in particular, to the statement in the new World Bank report:[1]

“Building on the Gender Strategy consultations the WBG will expand partnerships with civil society.”

THE GOOD NEWS: Dozens of civil society organizations in many developing countries today are addressing gender issues, making progress by setting model examples and building networks to support women and their rights.  The World Bank’s operations could be strengthened by greater efforts by World Bank staff to understand what CSOs are doing and their successes and failures on gender issues and challenges. For example, consider the many examples highlighted by Accountability Lab -- https://accountabilitylab.org/category/gender/

AccountabilityLab Nepal
Gov-Her-nance: Five ways to foster collaboration between local governments and communities

By Soni Khanal and Sanjeeta Pant Nepal is a largely patriarchal society with a hierarchical caste system. But fixing old problems and creating equitable government structures does not have to be an uphill battle. Initiatives such as Gov-HER-nance, a pioneering campaign initiated by Accountability Lab Nepal (ALN) in collaboration with female local government representatives in Nepal’s Dhangadhi sub-metropolitan city, brings in new voices and finds solutions to issues of gender equity, local development, and open government.

 CORRUPTION: The report’s analysis of gender inequality and its humanitarian, economic/development and environmental impact is lucid and compelling However, the Bank’s strategy fails to mention the degree to which corruption is both a cause of many of the difficulties, and an important impediment to progress. There are only two references to corruption in the report. Corruption – notably low-level petty corruption/extortion impacts the poor in most middle-and low-income countries in terms of their access to healthcare, education, basic police services, access to credit, obtaining licenses and many other basic services. In so many of the social service delivery areas women are disproportionately impacted by extortion. The World Bank’s report fails to reflect this, yet corruption is the constant that so many civil society organizations daily confront as they strive to work in developing countries to advance the rights of women. The lack of data on how corruption impacts women may be one reason why the Bank downplays this central issue, especially when  it comes to gender-based violence (please see the notes below on data and, as an example, the actions being taken in Argentina by civil society).

CSOs.

As Karin Millet, a former World Bank official and currently a Senior Advisor to the Partnership for Transparency Fund notes: “What civil society organizations offer is often access to counseling, temporary shelter, legal advice (if there is any legal framework that criminalizes GBV), and, if there is any enforcement mechanism against those who commit the violence, help victims to bring their case in a court of justice. These organizations can also be advocates for changes to laws and enforcement mechanisms, and they can also be a source of data on the type and extent of GBV, which helps provide governments with solid statistical information with regard to the extent of GBV at national, regional and local levels.”

                For example: LGBTQ - Dr. Iftekharuzzaman (Iftekhar Zaman), Executive Director of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), stresses: “One point for consideration: whatever shape this partnership of CS with WB takes, it should specifically include protection of defenders of rights of gender diverse communities, with particular emphasis on 'third gender' and individuals of diverse sexual orientations.

The other potentially unpopular question is how to ensure that the actors and stakeholders in this partnership including WB themselves practice what they preach. 

  For example: Small Countries - Lovania Pertab, Chairperson, Transparency International Mauritius. Barrister at law. “For small island economies like Mauritius there is a distinct dichotomy: on the one hand, education of girls up to tertiary education has gone up whereas women  still stagnate to break the glass ceiling. Also female representation in politics is very low. I think that particular attention must be given by the World Bank as to the strategy to be adopted to reach parity in small island economies.

                For example: Arab countries - S. Sharaf Almosawi, Bahrain Transparency. “We need to engage the World Bank in the Arab region, especially the role of civil society and the restrictions and decline in its freedom of action. It is appropriate for the Bank to include, within its economic support for Arab countries, conditions that reflect the need to empower women in government work and private institutions owned by governments, especially in leadership positions and boards of directors. It is also necessary to look at empowering women politically, as the role of women is still declining. And to stipulate within its conditions that civil society institutions are able to monitor contracts that are completed based on the aid that countries receive from the World Bank (I mean the activities that fall within the World Bank’s aid, which women must contribute to managing), in addition to activating civil society institutions in education, awareness, and discovering cases of corruption in government and private activity.”

The following notes contain constructive proposals from civil society as well as criticisms of the new Bank strategy.

 Partnership modalities between the Bank and Civil Society: A number of civil society comments underscore the increasing pressures by authoritarian governments on the activities of CSOs and the vital need for the World Bank to engage with force to ensure that CSOs can operate fully and openly in World Bank projects. There is inadequate attention in the Bank’s new strategy to this severe constraint on many CSOs.

Credibility - The report rightly asserted: “Gender-based violence (GBV) is the most egregious manifestation of gender inequality and an alarming challenge to global public health, human rights, and development.”  This is an issue so widespread, so deeply related to culture in all countries, and so radically different from all of the others that the World Bank addresses in its report – it cannot be meaningfully, sustainably addressed at an appropriate scale by individual World Bank lending operations and/or by agreements between the Bank and its client governments, or by Bank pressure to change laws. It stretches credulity to believe the Bank’s operations can, as the strategy declares “end gender-based violence.”

Scale - The Bank’s report fails to recognize both the scale of the problem and the efforts in many countries by civil society to address it to some degree. Last week, for example, as the BBC reported: “Tens of thousands of women in West Bengal state marched through the streets on Wednesday night in protest against the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at a state-run hospital in Kolkata last week.”  How can the Bank engage with such mass movements that can be vital to ending GBV? 

Equal partners - The report rightly stressed: “Achieving gender equality requires working across political, economic, and social institutions—formal, traditional, and informal. This may imply expanding participation in decision- making and shifting the incentives and mindsets of policymakers and other formal and informal actors.”  Operationalizing this must involve forms of partnership by the Bank with civil society that the Bank has never achieved before. It not only needs to involve scaling-up in major ways the partnerships with civil society, as well as forging genuine partnerships. This will require the Bank to recognize that in its operations it cannot have total control and that it must respect civil society partners as equals in planning, management and monitoring. It must involve full funding for large-scale civil society participation. Many civil society organizations in many countries will want to see a directive from the World Bank’s President supporting this understanding before they accept that the Bank wishes to be a sincere equal partner in gender-related operations. 

As former World Bank official Aileen Marshall (former Senior Advisor to the Global Coalition for Africa, responsible for its political economy portfolio, and worked in project management for USAID.  Currently, member of the PTF Management team) points out, while the Bank and CSOs could find many gender-related areas to work together constructively, “the Bank has to proactively make it happen and really engage with CSOs as equal partners, not just pay lip service to the idea.  The Bank could provide funding to CSOs to conduct research, monitor programs, or implement activities. It could also share information much more with CSOs on what it is doing, research it is undertaking, and implementation and results of projects.  This would enable more informed interaction with CSOs and better feedback.”  

Suggestions are made for the Bank to explicitly address the core issue of partnerships.

For example, Dr. Peter Eigen, Founder, Transparency International, writes: “My strong advice is that the World Bank should build on muti-stakeholder consensus building, as we do at TI, at EITI, at numerous other successful CSOs . This is also my advice for fighting for gender equality .” 

Karin Millet, former World Bank senior official, PTF Senior Advisor, suggests: “It is good to know that the WB is seeking concrete proposals on how to work with civil society organizations on the issue of GBV.  There are many examples of such kinds of cooperation that the WB can easily research and adapt to fit the WB's strategy. The EU and the Asian Development Bank, to name a couple, have formalized partnerships with civil society, and many country-level examples of partnership exist.”

Cissy Nabazinga Kagaba, based in Uganda. International development consultant recently worked in South Sudan. Formerly Executive Director of the Anti-Corruption Coalition Uganda and worked with the Uganda Human Rights Commission.  “My proposal would be that each country comes up with KPI (Key Performance Indicator\s) jointly with CSOs. These can both me short- and long-term.  Each country where the WB is domiciled has unique gender related issues and customizing them to fit the strategy will be paramount.  Quarterly reflection sessions with the Bank in as far as achieving key milestones can also be conducted. 

Richard Stern, Co-President, Partnership for Transparency Fund, former World Bank official serving as Vice President of Human Resources, Director for Energy, Industry, Telecommunications and Mining.  “As a part of launching this new initiative I would suggest that we ask the Bank to commit to developing a concrete action plan, in cooperation with both government and civil society, in  two or three  countries.  This would require the Bank to commit the necessary resources, including financial support for local CSO’s to meaningfully participate in such a process.  Consistent with the findings, the plans would include the development of specific gender elements, together  with  targets/milestones, for the Bank's operational program in the specific country.” 

DATA – the World Bank and other institutions have long tended to ignore sextortion for lack of data. Here, the Bank could learn from civil society and partner constructively.

Example: The approaches being pursued in Argentina – here there could be opportunities for constructive partnerships by the World Bank -- From: Marina Benavides, Coordinadora, Poder Ciudadano, the TI national chapter in Argentina – “In Poder Ciudadano (Transparency International Argentina) the gender agenda is structural and strategic for the organization. We have a strong commitment to gender mainstreaming in all our work and within the framework of the Gender and Integrity Program we work specifically on corruption as a form of gender-based violence such as sextortion.   Sextortion is a very present crime in the street level bureaucracies of public institutions that hinders the exercise of fundamental rights, especially of women and LGBTIQA+. However, this crime is not usually reported for fear of reprisals, the stigma attached to the victims and because there is distrust in the justice system. Therefore, although abuses do exist, beyond the important advance of the Global Corruption Barometer for Latin America -which, for the first time, talked about sextortion-, there is very little data available to stop and punish those who commit them.  

Concerned about this gap, Poder Ciudadano is currently taking on the challenge of generating this urgent and necessary data in order to make visible, raise awareness and promote policies to address this problem. Thus was born the project “Reportar: when corruption is gender violence”, a web site that will allow to anonymously report acts of sextortion that occur throughout the country. The site is currently being designed and aims to provide, through geo-references, visibility on where this type of crime occurs, who commits it and what characteristics and modalities it presents. It is also proposed that those who report anonymously should receive adequate information on counseling, reporting and legal, psychological and social support for victims.

To carry out this work, we partnered with public institutions specialized in addressing complex crimes like corruption and human trafficking such as the Public Prosecutor's Offices, experts in data generation and civil society organizations specialized in addressing gender violence. The collaborative work will allow us to generate the best possible data matrix so that the information produced will allow authorities, civil society and academia to carry out a multi-stakeholder approach. This project also includes the articulation with journalists to strategize the communication of the project and carry out storytelling initiatives. As you will see, the project is not only challenging, it is complex and ambitious, but we are sure that it will only bring good results.  We believe that this initiative, unique in its kind, will allow, once and for all, to shed light on an extremely harmful but invisible and, even worse, naturalized problem.

At Poder Ciudadano we firmly believe in building strategic alliances to make the message we seek to deliver even more powerful, which is why we have shared several spaces with UN Women, the IACHR and Transparency International, of course. And we are sure that working with the World Bank would also be fundamental to push the agenda forward. 

   Having a law is insufficient.

Example: Dr. Godswill Agbagwa, Priest, Academic, Socialpreneur and Youth Animator, based in Maryland, USA. Founder and President CSAAE - The Centre for Social Awareness, Advocacy and Ethics -CSAAE- in Nigeria.  “Sexual harassment is common in Nigerian tertiary institutions. Although the government has passed the VAPP act to deal with this and the university commission has asked universities to develop policies, most universities do not have policies and there is no will to do so. In my state, Imo, none of the 5 major universities has sexual harassment policy. So, CSAAE invited the directors of gender centers in these schools and worked with them to develop a sexual harassment policy.  CSAAE has pushed it to one of the universities for adoption with the hope that once done, we can push to others. We are waiting for approval. In addition to drafting the policy, we have also developed a domestication strategy to follow the adoption. We have also developed reporting structures to hold perpetrators accountable. The rationale is that external reporting team will be more effective in a corrupt university system. Can World Bank support CSOs to build capacity to help universities domesticate sexual harassment policies and ensure compliance?”

Example: Dr. Pietronella van den Oever, former World Bank senior official, held positions at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Switzerland and field assignments in agricultural development for FAO in West Africa. Her main professional focus was on population and economically and socially sustainable development. Member, Board of Directors, Partnership for Transparency Fund). “Having a law on the books generally does not mean much. It is rather the concrete actions that speak for themselves. And it is important for the World Bank to make long-term commitments. As we currently work on vaccination programs OAFRESS in 18 Francophone African countries we see have seen the hunger for knowledge and know-how on gender issues in these programs – the field participants “the Champions” are hungry for insights into others' experiences on how to tackle gender issues in activities for improving childhood vaccination  - the greatest benefit does not come from so-called “experts” talking to the group, but rather from encouraging practitioners to share their experiences.”

Walking the talk.

Jessica Chilin-Hernández, from El Salvador, based in Washington, D.C., Graduate, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service: “the WBG leadership’s handling of findings from its own Inspection Panel raises significant questions about the Bank’s commitment to these goals, especially when it comes to the rights and well-being of vulnerable populations such as indigenous women, men, and children. The recent handling of the Santa Cruz Road Corridor Connector Project in Bolivia serves as a stark example. The Inspection Panel identified several areas of noncompliance with the Bank’s Operational Policies, particularly those related to environmental assessment, involuntary resettlement, and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Despite these findings, the Management Action Plan (MAP) proposed by the Bank was inadequate, lacking meaningful engagement with the affected indigenous communities and failing to provide proper remedies for the harms caused: https://bankinformationcenter.org/en-us/update/will-the-world-bank-provide-remedy-for-those-harme/ This situation not only undermines the credibility of the World Bank’s stated commitment to gender equality but also raises fundamental questions about how the Bank can effectively support concerted action, financing, and programs at scale when it appears to disregard the very mechanisms designed to ensure accountability and protection for vulnerable populations. How can we trust that the Bank’s gender strategy will be implemented with the seriousness and integrity it demands when its leadership seems willing to overlook critical findings that directly impact the lives of indigenous women, men, and children? So, while the WBG’s new Gender Strategy is a step in the right direction, its success will ultimately depend on the Bank’s willingness to hold itself accountable and to genuinely partner with civil society. Without this, the strategy risks becoming more aspirational than actionable, and the opportunity to make real progress on gender equality may be lost.”

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Further information from CSO colleagues in several countries:

·       The more we can fight corruption the more we can promote gender equality and the World Bank’s strategy needs to recognize this. today.  Please see, for example, “Sextortion - Covert Corruption - A Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

·       Madagascar in schools and universities stated that the youngest victim of sextortion that was found was a girl aged 11“Sexual Corruption in Schools and Universities,”.

·       Partnership for Transparency Fund’s successful current project - Building a Coordinated Response to Prevent and Reduce Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in Kishangarh Block, Ajmer, Rajasthan India,  - also, updated August 6, 2024, overview report.

·       Using technology to support students in Nigeria -  Using Timby To Fight Sextortion In Nigerian Universities. The power of media in promoting change – this documentary played a major role in promoting legislation - by the BBC - EYE ON AFRICA Sex for Grades: Undercover inside Nigerian and Ghanaian universities -

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[1] In response to the World Bank’s call for comment on its draft gender strategy in November 2023, about v90 individuals (many of them leaders of civil society organizations) from 50 countries submitted a letter to the World Bank.