Lucia Hanmer

Voice and agency : empowering women and girls for shared prosperity

This report on voice and agency, which builds on the 2012 World Development Report, focuses on several areas key to womens empowerment: freedom from violence, control over sexual and reproductive health and rights, ownership and control of land and housing, and voice and collective action. It explores the power of social norms in dictating how men and women can and cannot behave, deterring women from owning property or working even where laws permit, for example, because those who do become outcasts. The report distills vast data and hundreds of studies to shed new light on constraints facing women and girls worldwide, from epidemic levels of gender-based violence to biased laws and norms that prevent them from owning property, working, and making decisions about their own lives. It highlights promising reforms and interventions from around the world and lays out an urgent agenda for governments, civil society, development agencies, and other stakeholders. Among its keys findings: girls with little or no education are far more likely to be married as children, suffer domestic violence, live in poverty, and lack a say over household spending or their own health care than better-educated peers, which harms them, their children, and communities.

Exploring Women's Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries: Where do we stand?

ABSTRACT While central notions around agency are well established in academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countries. Measuring key dimensions of womens agency and empowerment is complex, but feasible and important. This paper systematically explores what can be learned from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for fifty-eight countries, representing almost 80 percent of the female population of developing countries. It is the first such empirical investigation. The findings quantify some important correlations. Completing secondary education and beyond has consistently large positive associations, underlining the importance of going beyond primary schooling. There appear to be positive links with poverty reduction and economic growth, but clearly this alone is not enough. Context specificity and multidimensionality mean that the interpretation of results is not always straightforward.

Child Marriage: A Critical Barrier to Girls' Schooling and Gender Equality in Education

E ducation is not only a human right, but also a powerful tool for women’s empowerment and a strategic development investment. There is a clear multiplier effect to educating girls; women who are educated are healthier, participate more in the formal labor market, earn more income, have fewer children, and provide better healthcare and education to their children compared to women with little or no education (Klugman et al. 2014). The benefits of education thus transmit across generations as well as to communities at large. Where girls have greater educational and economic opportunities, they are more likely to pursue those opportunities than to have children in their teenage years. Yet a host of structural, social, and financial barriers prevent girls’ enrollment and completion of both primary and secondary schools. Over the past two decades, uneven progress has been made toward gender equality in global education goals. The most recent UNESCO data show that of 161 countries, 60 percent have achieved gender parity in enrollment at the primary school level, compared to only 38 percent of countries at the secondary level. Major gender imbalances persist, especially in lowincome countries, just 20 percent of which have reached gender parity at the primary level, and only 10 percent at the secondary level. This is a major global challenge. At current rates of

How Does Poverty Differ Among Refugees? Taking a Gender Lens to the Data on Syrian Refugees in Jordan

Data collected for refugee registration and to target humanitarian assistance include information about household composition and demographics that can be used to identify gender-based vulnerabilities. This paper combines the microdata collected by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to register refugees with data from its Home Visit surveys to analyze income poverty rates among refugees with a gender lens. It finds distinguishing between different types of male and female principal applicant (PA) households is important in the setting of Syrian refugees in Jordan. Poverty rates for couples with children do not differ by gender of the PA but for other household types poverty rates are higher for those with female PAs. Households formed because of the unpredictable dynamics of forced displacement, such as sibling households, unaccompanied children, and single caregivers, are extremely vulnerable, especially if the principal applicant is a woman or a girl.