Deadline: 24-Feb-2020 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.)
The consulting firm will be recruited to conduct the needs assessment of National Trade
Facilitation Committees (NTFCs) in 15 West African countries, design training materials, and roll out the training. The assignment is in two phases. The winner of the phase 1 contract will be awarded the phase 2 upon successful completion of the phase 1.
Deadline: 30-Jan-2020 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.) 
The objective of this activity is to carry out a qualitative baseline assessment of the effects of street lighting (or the lack of it) on mens and womens perceptions of safety and on mobility, economic activity, and educational and professional opportunities. The analysis will also include a comprehensive qualitative assessment of the current level of street lighting (pole presence, energy source, technology, brightness, availability, reliability, etc.), and a review of the literature on the impacts of street lighting on crime and violence.
Deadline: 13-Jan-2020 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.) 
There will be key criteria for the development of the deliverables:
1. Gender Gaps: A focus on gender equality priorities across the categories policy, leadership, employment, is expected.
2. Client Focus: The focus will be on providing relevant content and recommendations( strategies/remedial actions, activities and programmes) to the WB and KenGen which will be focused in the energy sector and other sectors such as education etc.
3. Partnerships: The consultant will be expected to map out feasible partnerships with e.g. like minded companies and institutions professional associations, universities and NGOs as part of the outputs delivered.
4. Budget and Sustainability: Key will be mapping costs and timelines of the interventions proposed in the gender options analysis. This is essential for sustainability.
5. Key Performance Indicators. What will be the success factors
6. Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. Define how to measure success
Deadline: 17-Jun-2019 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.)
To address both the skills gap and the gender gap, IFC, in partnership with construction
company Rhodes PNG, is exploring the possibility of establishing a technical training college for women in PNG. Rhodes PNG has identified a site located at their Napa Napa campus, outside of Port Moresby, and have indicated they are interested in donating that site for use as a womens technical training college. IFC is now at the stage of conducting a detailed market assessment which will feed into the development of a detailed business plan for the proposed training college (Womens TVET project).
The objective of this assignment is to conduct a landscape analysis and market study to assess the feasibility of the proposed Womens TVET Project. It will include an assessment of the industry demand for skills and commitment toward supporting improved supply of skilled workers; , the current training supply in PNG; as well as the challenges and opportunities for women to access more and better training, and ultimately to access jobs. This assignment also aims to raise awareness of the project and obtain initial buy-in from industry.
Outputs under this assignment will be use to canvass potential investors and inform a go/ no go decision prior to developing a full business plan
Deadline: 24-Dec-2018 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.) 
The Bank is seeking the services of a firm to carry out activities for the inclusive preparation of Gender Strategy and Action Plans (GSAPs) for the following Regional Economic Communities (RECs): The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS); The Economic Community for Central African States (ECCAS); and The Southern African Development Community (SADC). They have expressed the need for support for developing comprehensive and effective guidelines for mainstreaming gender considerations into disaster risk management policies, plans of action and programs. Tasks include preparation of individual Inception Reports for each REC; gender analysis and stakeholder consultations; REC-level discussions and feedback events; and finalization of customized Gender Strategies and Action Plans in Disaster Risk Management for each REC.
Still today, in almost all societies around the world, women are less well-off than men.
Women are still paid less than men; they are less represented in business, politics and decision-making. Their life chances remain overwhelmingly less promising than those of men.
This inequality hurts us all. The world would be 20% better off if women were paid the same as men. Delaying early marriage in the developing world by just a few years would add more than $500 billion to annual global economic output by 2030.
Scientific and technological advances are transforming lives: they are even helping 
poorer countries close the gap with rich countries in life expectancy. But, poorer countries still face tremendous challenges, as almost a quarter of children under five are malnourished, and 60 percent of primary school students are failing to achieve even a rudimentary education. In fact, more than 260 million children and youth in poorer countries are receiving no education at all.
There is a moral case to be made, of course, for investing in the health and education of all people. But there is an economic one as well: to be ready to compete and thrive in a rapidly changing environment. “Human capital” – the potential of individuals – is going to be the most important long-term investment any country can make for its people’s future prosperity and quality of life.
The World Bank Group and the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) announced a new open call for awards recognizing promising innovations aimed at preventing and responding to gender-based violence. Applications for the Development Marketplace for Innovation in Addressing Gender-Based Violence must be received online by September 5, 2018.
It is probably fair to say that the World Bank’s latest report on intergenerational mobility – Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World – is the first-ever attempt to paint a truly global picture of how achievement – or the lack thereof – is transmitted across generations. Though there are results for income mobility for a subset of countries, most of the analysis focuses on educational attainment across 148 economies, representing over 95% of the world’s population.
Across low-income countries, fewer than one in every three girls are enrolled in secondary school. Many interventions to improve girls’ access to school provide cash, such as cash transfers in Malawi or Nepal. But what if girls had better skills to advocate for their own interests? In a recent experiment in Zambia, Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Corinne Low, and Kathleen McGinn tested what happens when adolescent girls receive negotiation training. The results are documented in their paper, “Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-Generational Investment.” Over the course of six two-hour after-school sessions, eighth-grade girls engaged in discussion, role-playing, storytelling, and game play to learn four principles of negotiation from college educated Zambian women.
Here’s an example of how this played out for one of the girls, as she negotiated with her parents for school fees:
“I asked my parents if they could talk with me. I put on my chitenge [traditional material skirt], and knelt before them. I chose to approach with respect and so they asked me to stand and sit in the chair near them and tell them what I wanted to say. I said that I really wanted to be able to go back to school but wasn’t able to because the school fees weren’t paid. They said I knew that the family had no more money so it wasn’t possible. I said I know that mom sells chickens out of the house. I see that some people sell them in the marketplace nearby. If I can sell some chickens in the market over the school holiday, could I use the money for my school fees? They agreed and that is how I got to go back to school.”
You can see how she put the principles together: Me – she identified her interest: go back to school. You – she approached her parents with respect and listened to their concern. Together – she saw that the “no” wasn’t from a lack of desire from her parents but from an external obstacle. Build – she proposed a win-win situation. Not every negotiation is about school fees. One girl recounted using the skills to push back against her boyfriend’s demands for sex. Another wrote about negotiation with her sister to exchange child care for hair styling.
Two months after the negotiation training, the girls who participated (“negotiators”) scored much better on an open-ended test of how to find time to study for an exam when a younger brother needed watching. Over the course of the next couple of years, dropout rates were ten percentage points lower for negotiators, and attendance – for girls enrolled in school – was slightly higher. Although some other outcomes – performance in the top quarter on math and English tests and reported pregnancy rates – remained unchanged, an index of all the effects together improves, even when the enrollment effects are excluded. (When interpreting the lack of a pregnancy effect, keep in mind that reported pregnancies in the compaision group are already very low, just 4 percent.) The negotiation skills kept girls in school. Parents reported that negotiators were more likely to ask for more food and did fewer weekday chores; but they also reported that negotiators were more respectful, less likely to give difficulty in doing the chores they had, and more likely to do chores on Fridays – when schoolwork is less pressing.
For the girls with the highest language ability at baseline, the effects on enrollment and attendance are even stronger, and performance on an English test also rose.
But wait, is it really the negotiation skills? Maybe exposure to these college-educated Zambian mentors in a safe space is what’s actually driving these findings. Or maybe interacting with that mentor simply provided better information about the returns to education, which we know can keep youth in school. To test this, the researchers tried two other interventions: one with the same mentors and the same safe space but no negotiation training, and a second that provided information on the returns to education and on HIV prevention. The information intervention had no impact on any outcomes, and the safe space intervention had a similar – slightly smaller – impact on enrollment to the negotiation program, and lower estimated impacts on every other impact (albeit not statistically significantly different). The safe space intervention also had almost no impact on parent reports about the child’s behavior and chores at home.
But wait (again!), does this harm the other children in the household? The researchers look for impacts on other children in the school and in the household and find little evidence of negative spillovers. It didn’t affect the distribution of chores and if anything, it increased the amount of time parents expected sisters of the negotiators to do their own schoolwork. Parents of negotiators do report a higher likelihood to pay girls’ school fees over those of boys, but they don’t reduce the expected years of education for boys in the household. As the authors put it, “While it may seem surprising that increased educational investment in the treated girl did not negatively affect her siblings, this could be because the increased investment came out of parents’ consumption or because girls used negotiation to arrive at solutions that increased family welfare.”
There’s much more in the paper, including lab-in-the-field games to show how the program affected interactions between parents and children, and machine learning techniques to shape the heterogeneity analysis. But this intervention shows that adolescents can learn valuable socio-emotional skills, working through the education system.
Most directly, it demonstrates that it’s possible to help girls to stay in school by making them more effective advocates for themselves.
For more about the program, you can read this story on NPR’s Goats and Soda blog.
