FIAS Prioritizes Gender Equality

Gender equality is a fundamental human right. It is a foundation for a peaceful and prosperous world and essential for development. The current unprecedented times, however, threaten gender equality. Pandemics, inflation, climate change, and forced displacement have impacted girls, women, and sexual and gender minorities disproportionately. The FIAS programmatic theme on Gender and Inclusion is a key priority for advisory projects. FIAS encourages and incentivizes project teams to design and implement gender-smart solutions, study gender gaps in the markets identified by the project, and monitor gender-related development outcomes and impacts.

The FIAS programmatic theme on Gender and Inclusion cuts across much of the client-facing and global programmatic work supported by the FIAS FY22—26 strategy cycle. Across the portfolio, more than two-thirds of FIAS-supported projects have the gender flag, well ahead of IFC’s corporate goal of 40 percent of the advisory portfolio. Within the FIAS Core account, the program is doubling the corporate target such that about 80 percent of FIAS Core projects include gender components. In the FY22–26 cycle, FIAS funding plays a key role in supporting reforms and creating conditions for investments and transactions that redress gender disparities in client country private sectors.

Women have limited private sector participation, an unequal share of unpaid care work, lack of ownership or inheritance to land or property, and high levels of sexual violence. Such inequities have restricted women from fully participating in their economies and prevented them from enjoying prosperous lives. IFC aims to create markets for all and focuses its attention on partnering with clients to enhance the same economic opportunities for women as well as men. In this context, under the FIAS Gender and Inclusion crosscutting theme, FIAS focuses on three areas: (1) reducing the barriers to success for women-owned and women-led businesses; (2) promoting inclusive business models; and (3) working with IFC industry teams to create the conditions for new investment opportunities and transactions that expand opportunities for women. Of the 172 projects in the FIAS FY24 portfolio, 116 projects, or 67 percent, are gender-flagged; of the 96 FIAS Core projects in the portfolio, 76 projects, or 79 percent, are gender-flagged.

Among FIAS-supported projects, the Women and Insurance Phase II project builds is developing a women’s market insurance advisory product offering; Rwanda Legislative Reforms for Women’s Economic Inclusion aims to reduce gender legal inequalities and discrimination and increase women’s economic participation; Gender Inclusive Infrastructure focuses on achieving IFC’s corporate gender commitments by piloting gender-smart solutions in the power and cities sectors; and Pakistan2Equal works with companies to adopt gender-smart climate actions to ensure that gender inequality, including the wide gender gap in labor force participation, is not exacerbated as Pakistan transitions to a climate-smart economy.

The Women, Business and the Law (WBL) Africa Initiative aims to advance gender equality in Africa by supporting governments in the design, implementation, and dissemination of legislation toward increasing the participation of women in the economy. Projects for advancing reform implementation are ongoing in Côte d’Ivoire and Rwanda, with client engagement undertaken in a broader array of countries, including Gabon, Mauritania, Somalia, and Togo, as well as through World Bank lending operations in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.