Sub-Saharan Africa Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Plus Project

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Empowering women and girls is an essential strategy of the IDA20 policy commitments. Gender equality has been hit hard by the COVID crisis, highlighting the need for IDA countries to redouble efforts under IDA20. Gains in women’s and girls’ accumulation of human capital, economic empowerment, and voice and agency have been lost. Women and girls have lost access to schools, jobs, businesses, and incomes at a faster rate than men, while struggling with increased unpaid care responsibilities. With schools and work closures, there has been an alarming rise in adolescent pregnancies and gender-based violence (GBV). The proposed project contributes to the World Bank’s Regional Integration (RI) Strategy. In funding girls’ and women empowerment across several dimensions, the proposed project will contribute to accelerate the fertility transition, thus alleviating the population constraints that are fueling violence in the region, especially in cross-border areas. As such, the proposed project will directly contribute to the RI Strategy FY18-23. In particular, it will support RI themes, including but not limited to building human capital and the resilience themes. Furthermore, building human capital, in particular among women, figures as a key pillar in the respective participating countries’ Country Partnership Frameworks as well as in their national development and sector plans.Proposed clients for SWEDD+ are Burkina Faso, Chad, The Gambia, Senegal, and Togo. The Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) is proposed to join the current regional partner the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to strengthen regional capacity of the regional entities to promote, track and facilitate progress toward the demographic dividend, in line with the common policy framework adopted by AU member states in 2017. The operation will assist new countries to design, implement and achieve scale for integrated girls' and women’s empowerment interventions, strengthen capacity for a regional evaluation mechanism to approve, finance and evaluate adolescent girls’ programming and strengthen regional capacity to track overall progress toward project objectives. Across all countries, it will include several innovations of regional interest. Particular focus will be on seven hotspots where there is a high prevalence of child marriage, teenage pregnancy and early school drop-out; these hotspots transcend national borders and will significantly benefit from coordinated, collective action, as well as on peer learning across all countries to accelerate and improve implementation of interventions that have been rigorously proven to produce desired results along key dimensions of girls' and women’s empowerment.Activities under the project would include: i) social and behavioral change campaign activities to promote positive gender roles, girls’ continued schooling and other girls and women empowerment messages to target audiences; ii) at the community level, financial support, training and skills development for beneficiaries to remain in school or to engage in economic activities and improve their earning potential; iii) capacity building to strengthen delivery of Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Nutrition (RMNCAHN) services to adolescents in target communities (e.g., training of health workers); and iii) capacity building of national, regional and continental institutions to strengthen advocacy and political commitment on RMNCAHN and for policy making, monitoring and evaluation related to demographic dividend and gender issues. The project will also fund knowledge exchanges to facilitate peer learning and strengthen countries’ implementation capacity and will include an ambitious learning agenda to contribute to the global evidence base on what works at scale in adolescent programming. No infrastructure investments are planned as activities leverage existing infrastructure in the target communities.