ET Consultant

Overview

Conduct research to advance gender equality and inform policy reforms

You have:

• Master's degree in relevant field (public policy, economics, international development/affairs, political science) required, PhD strongly preferred.
• 5+ years of work experience. Proven experience in conducting policy research and analysis, including through macroeconomic approaches, preferably in the context of sub-Saharan Africa or other developing regions.
• Interest and/or background in gender is essential.
• Expertise on international women's rights frameworks and familiarity with gender issues in Africa and regional gender and development policy frameworks is strongly preferred.
• Experience supporting policy dialogue in a developing country (from either government side or donor/development partner side) preferred.
• Experience conducting national legal assessments and advising government stakeholders on legal, policy and institutional reforms preferred.
• Strong knowledge of policy, regulatory, and legal frameworks, particularly in relation to gender issues.
• Familiarity with gender mainstreaming approaches and tools.
• Strong written communication skills in English, working knowledge of French preferred.

ET Consultant

Job #: req31950 Organization: World Bank Sector: Gender Grade: EC2 Term Duration: 1 year 0 months Recruitment Type: Local Recruitment Location: Washington, DC,United States Required Language(s): English Preferred Language(s): French Closing Date: 3/12/2025 (MM/DD/YYYY) at 11:59pm UTC Description

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges. For more information, visit www.worldbank.org.

About the World Bank Group:

Established in 1944, the WBG is one of the world’s largest sources of funding and knowledge for development solutions. It is governed by 188-member countries and delivers services out of 120 offices with nearly 15,000 staff located globally. The WBG consists of five specialized institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

World Bank Group - International Development, Poverty, & Sustainability

With 189 member countries, the World Bank Group is a unique global partnership fighting poverty worldwide through sustainable solutions.

Background/General Description:

The Economist will work under the joint supervision of the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL, within the Africa Chief Economist’s Office) and Women, Business and the Law (WBL, within the Development Economics Vice Presidency) to advance gender equality across Africa and globally by leveraging rigorous research and data to inform policy. The Economist will generate, synthesize, and distill rigorous research on gender differences in the socio-economic impacts of laws, policies, and economy-wide reforms and will engage directly with policymakers at the country and regional levels to share and embed evidence into new policy reforms and operations. The role will include producing systematic reviews, briefs, and evidence syntheses on gender differences in the impact of legal and policy changes; analyzing household and national (including WBL) data; leading new quasi-experimental research to estimate the causal impact of policies and laws; testing innovative experimental pilots to strengthen the implementation of national policies and laws in Africa; and providing technical support to World Bank task teams and government counterparts to advance legal and policy reforms in areas such as women’s economic opportunities, gender-based violence, and financial inclusion. The position will be based in Washington, DC.

Overview of Africa GIL and WBL:

The World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), which is mapped to the Africa Region Chief Economist’s Office, conducts rigorous research in Sub-Saharan Africa to examine the gender gaps between men and women when it comes to economic growth and empowerment, and to understand how to close these gaps. With the results of these studies, Africa GIL aims to support the design of innovative, scalable interventions to address gender inequality in productive economic sectors across Africa. Africa GIL is currently working on over 80 impact evaluations, with additional work in the pipeline, and is composed of a core team of DC-based staff as well as staff based in three African countries.

Thematic and sectoral focus: GIL is focused on conducting rigorous research in order to generate evidence on how to close the gender gap in earnings, productivity, assets, and agency. GIL’s work is grouped into several thematic areas: agriculture, private sector development and entrepreneurship, land and property rights, empowering adolescent girls and youth employment, social protection, gender-based violence and social norms.

Impact Objective: Africa GIL aims to increase take-up of effective programs and policies by governments, development organizations, and the private sector in order to address the underlying causes of gender inequality in Africa, and through that promote growth. To achieve this, Africa GIL works to strengthen knowledge, in particular, by producing and delivering a new body of evidence and developing a compelling narrative, geared towards policymakers, on what works and what does not work in promoting gender equality. This new evidence will deepen capacity for gender-informed policymaking throughout the Africa region, including policies created and enacted by governments, as well as common practices and program models of private firms, civil society, and development agencies.

Women, Business and the Law (WBL) is a World Bank Group project, embedded in the World Bank’s Development Economics vice-presidency, collecting data on the laws and policy mechanisms that measure the enabling environment for women’s economic opportunity. Since 2009, WBL has been building a comprehensive dataset that offers objective and measurable benchmarks for global progress toward gender equality, offering insights into legal disparities across 190 economies throughout ten indicators, identifying gaps, monitoring progress, and advocating for change in legislation affecting women's rights. Comparable across economies, WBL data serves as a potent tool to promote legislative reforms for gender equality, demonstrating the progress made while emphasizing the work still to be done, and is crucial for research and policy discussions on improving women's economic opportunities and ensuring inclusive economic growth.

Thematic and sectoral focus: WBL data offer a comprehensive picture of the obstacles that women face in entering the workforce and contributing to greater prosperity—for themselves, their families, and their communities. WBL collects data on ten indicators (Safety, Workplace, Childcare, Mobility, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets and Pension) and recently expanded the scope of its analysis to measure the implementation gap between laws (de jure) and how they function in practice (de facto), with a view to gathering new evidence on the critical relationship between legal gender equality and women’s economic opportunities.

Impact objective: Through its research, analysis and policy-oriented publications, WBL aims to further establish the link between equal rights and women’s economic empowerment, making the case for increased investment in gender equality programs, including clarifying the link between women’s legal rights and critical issues like women’s leadership, macroeconomic stability, social norms, climate, and technology. Further, WBL regularly organizes high-profile events to disseminate the annual report findings within and outside the World Bank Group, bringing together representatives from the government, financial institutions, private sector, and civil society organizations. These efforts aim to generate a deeper dialogue on legal reform with a view to promoting gender equality globally.

Background:

To address the multifaceted challenges faced by women and girls and to close the gender gaps holding back inclusive growth across Africa, a business-as-usual approach will not be sufficient. Instead, a context-specific and scalable approach is required from the outset of program and policy development, and throughout implementation, based on rigorous evidence on the most effective solutions. To achieve this, it is crucial that research be co-designed with local partners to understand the underlying causes of gender-specific constraints hindering the empowerment of women and girls in a given context and to inform new, effective policy pathways to address them.

Africa GIL and WBL actively participated in the design and consultation process for the development of the World Bank Group’s new World Bank Group Gender Strategy (2024-2030), and will continue to contribute as key implementation partners of the latter. Specifically, Africa GIL will play a critical role in testing, replicating, and scaling innovative solutions to accelerate progress on women’s empowerment, equipping policymakers and practitioners to leverage data and knowledge for advocacy and mobilization, and helping increase the outcome-level orientation of WB reporting on gender. In parallel, WBL data and analysis will inform policy reforms and country engagement priorities to improve women’s economic opportunity. As demand for evidence-based policy guidance on gender increases, these complementary approaches will be crucial in advancing gender equality in African economies in the coming years.

The Project:

Africa GIL and WBL are partnering, with support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and the Think Africa Partnership (TAP) , in an effort to expand country-level and regional-level policy engagement and further develop their policy advisory capacity and tools to jointly support large-scale national programs and inform legal and policy reforms designed to empower women and promote gender equality. The partnership will take a variety of forms, including review and synthesis of existing evidence and generation of new evidence on the impact of laws and policies on selected women’s socio-economic outcomes, knowledge dissemination through audience-tailored products and platforms, provision of targeted support to policymakers and country teams, and collaborations with large-scale programs and regional bodies, and academic/research partners. This work will be supported by a dedicated Economist supervised by both teams.

Duties and Accountabilities:

The Extended Term Consultant will work under the joint supervision of the Head of the Africa Gender Innovation Lab, Michael O’Sullivan, and the Manager for the Women, Business and the Law project, Tea Trumbic. The Economist will be responsible for carrying out knowledge generation and evidence synthesis to inform policy reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa, drafting knowledge products and delivering events, providing targeted support to policymakers, and collaborating with large-scale programs and regional bodies. Specific tasks will include:

●Systematic review and synthesis of existing literature on the impact of legal, policy, and institutional reforms on gender equality in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, including on key WBL indicators (Safety, Workplace, Childcare, Mobility, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets and Pension) and intersections with the policy landscape in Africa and priority outcomes identified by the Africa GIL, such as GBV, women’s labor force participation, financial inclusion, girls’ education, and fertility. ●Drawing on these findings and based on gaps identified by WBL in legal frameworks and downstream implementation, estimating the impact of legal, policy and institutional reforms on gender outcomes in selected pilot countries, and determining the most effective approaches to achieving gender equality. This work will entail:

1. Working with task teams, including government and World Bank country and project teams, in selected African countries, to identify and design innovative pilot interventions and impact evaluations that target and test gender equal policy, legal and/or institutional reforms. 2. Leading policy impact assessments and/or other causal inference studies to test the impacts of selected reforms on a range of social and economic outcomes for women and girls, including generating new evidence on macro-micro policy linkages, and strengthening knowledge on effective implementation of gender-equal laws and policies. This may involve designing baseline and follow-up surveys, undertaking data analysis, and writing research papers of publishable quality, in close collaboration with economists and qualitative researchers/social scientists. 3. Building and managing teams comprised of external researchers, government and NGO collaborators, in-country staff, data analysts, and survey teams. 4. Conducting data analysis using STATA. 5. Contributing to the development of project work plans, budgets, contracts, etc 6. Presenting on work and delivering technical workshops to government counterparts, project teams and other select audiences; organizing training and workshop sessions on selected contents; and preparing documents, including policy and research papers, intended for external release.

●Synthesizing findings into audience-tailored knowledge products to shape policy dialogue and promote gender-equal policies and gender-responsive implementation approaches. ●Contributing to the mapping of micro evidence to WB programs, and to informing the design of effective legal reforms and implementation approaches to feed into WB Development Policy Operation (DPOs), and national and local policy and regulatory frameworks. ●Identifying and leveraging opportunities under the new World Bank Group Knowledge Compact (knowledge advisory teams, World Bank Academy, etc.) to reach policymakers and influence legal and policy reforms. ●Providing technical support to policy engagement activities by the Ethiopia and Nigeria Gender Innovation Labs and to similar country-based models under development; and contributing to the activities of the WB intra-departmental Task Force on Gender Policy and Legal Reforms, particularly to ensure integration of gender into Development Policy Operations (DPOs). ●Helping create new partnerships between GIL and external research collaborators, in academia, NGOs, and government, by supporting GIL’s calls for proposals and new partners, and the subsequent review of expressions of interest, and concept note creation for possible new policy impact assessments. ●Supporting the team’s fundraising efforts by preparing fundraising proposals, liaising with trust funds department and preparing reports for donors.

Selection Criteria

• Master’s degree in relevant field (public policy, economics, international development/affairs, political science) required, PHD strongly preferred. • 5+ years of work experience. Proven experience in conducting policy research and analysis, including through macroeconomic approach, preferably in the context of sub-Saharan Africa or other developing regions. Authored publications in the field of interest would be an asset. • Experience working or studying in one or more Sub-Saharan African countries will be a strong plus; Interest and/or background in gender essential. • Expertise on international women’s rights frameworks, and familiarity with gender issues in Africa and regional gender and development policy frameworks strongly preferred. • Experience supporting policy dialogue in a developing country (from either government side or donor/development partner side) preferred. • Experience conducting national legal assessments and advising government stakeholders on legal, policy and institutional reforms preferred. • Strong knowledge of policy, regulatory, and legal frameworks, particularly in relation to gender issues. • Familiarity with gender mainstreaming approaches and tools. • Strong written communication skills in English, working knowledge of French preferred.

World Bank Group Core Competencies

The World Bank Group offers comprehensive benefits, including a retirement plan; medical, life and disability insurance; and paid leave, including parental leave, as well as reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities.

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Potential interview questions

Added 1 year ago - Updated 1 year ago - Source: worldbank.org