Yemisi Izuora
The World Bank is promoting awareness initiatives to eliminate progressive discrimination against women, girls and marginalized groups in the world.
The Bank maintains that accelerating gender equality is an urgent imperative, as it observes that the world is experiencing an unprecedented set of crises with disproportionately negative impacts on women, girls, sexual and gender minorities, and marginalized groups.
Gender equality is a matter of fairness and justice, a foundation for a peaceful and prosperous world and essential for development.
Yet achieving gender equality is uniquely challenging and complex. It calls for changes spanning country laws and policies, public and private sector activities, and personal lives. Growing evidence on the wide-ranging negative impacts of gender constraints, and on how to address them, can inspire and inform the way forward.
The World Bank Group (WBG) Gender Strategy 2024-30 puts forward the bold ambition to accelerate gender equality to end poverty on a livable planet in alignment with the World Bank Group Evolution Roadmap.
The strategy responds to the global urgency, fundamentality, and complexity of achieving gender equality.
Building on implementation of the WBG Gender Strategy 2016-23 the new strategy engages with greater ambition – approaching gender equality for all as essential for global development – and engages differently.
The WBG Gender Strategy 2024-30 focuses on concerted action, financing, and programs at scale to support foundational wellbeing, economic participation and women’s leadership.
This will contribute to, Progress in ending all forms of gender-based violence, Stronger and more resilient human capital, More and better jobs, including jobs of the future, Greater ownership and use of economic assets, Wider access to and use of enabling services and Advances in women’s participation in decision-making.
The 2024-30 strategy was shaped by two years of intensive internal and external consultations, starting with the year-long Accelerate Equality campaign and informal dialogues, (Phase I, January 2022 to July 2023), and feeding into the formal consultations, (Phase II, July to November 2023).
The World Bank Group received input from more than 1,000 external stakeholders from over 110 countries, including 28 in-country consultations. These contributors represented over 600 entities – spanning civil society, government representatives, parliamentarians, academia, private sector, development partners and others.