Call for Expressions of Interest: World Bank Africa’s GIL Intervention Program

The Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), an initiative of the World Bank Group, is on the lookout for governments, donors, and private sector organizations and NGOs with interventions designed to promote women’s economic empowerment in Nigeria.

What is the GIL program about?

The GIL seeks to collate evidence to find out the best methods of closing existing gender gaps in five key areas such as agriculture, entrepreneurship, land and property rights, social protection, social norms, and youth employment.

In the course of 2020-2021, GIL is set to launch a new set of impact evaluation (IE) studies that evaluate interventions focused on reducing constraints experienced by women in rural Nigeria.

Through GIL’s analytical work, it has been able to pinpoint the following key issues driving gender gaps in income from economic activities in Nigeria.

These include access to input, limited crop choice, labor, and mechanization for women farmers; access to capital stock and position in the value chain for women entrepreneurs; sectoral segregation for female salary workers; and time availability for all working women.

What are its objectives?

The goal of the GIL impact evaluation is to find possible solutions to bridging gender gaps as well as identify other constraints to women’s economic empowerment.

Then, each GIL impact evaluation is selected to address critical knowledge gaps, sharing insights with policymakers and project teams to enable them to make informed decisions.

The GIL, in conjunction with partners, designs, sets up and oversees rigorous impact evaluations of interventions executed by NGOs, governments, and private sector programs, policies, and products.

Who qualifies for the GIL program?

To qualify for this initiative, successful applicants must:

• Be a donor, government, NGO, or private sector organization;
• Possess a new or existing intervention with intentions to roll-out or scale-up planning to roll out or scale up directed towards promoting women’s economic empowerment in Nigeria; having secured the necessary funding to carry the scheme;
• Be willing to gain insights into how and why their intervention is working through a scientifically sound, quantitative impact evaluation;
• Be willing to reinforce their intervention’s design to effectively serve and promote women’s interests.

What are the criteria for eligibility?

The Expression of Interest’s (EOI) selection criteria include the following:

Geographical Fit: Your proposed intervention must take place in rural Nigeria. GIL operates within Sub-Saharan Africa, hence, only interventions in rural Nigeria will be eligible for evaluation under this expression of interest call.

Project Fit: The intervention must be new or current, having the potential to boost women’s economic empowerment in rural areas.

Project Partner’s Capacity and Risk Factors: As a prospective partner, you must have proven your capacity to successfully execute the type and scale of intervention you are proposing. You must have secured funding to implement the intervention.

In addition, the environment must be sufficiently secure within the time frame of the project so as not to weaken the impact evaluation

Organizational Dedication to Learning: You must be willing to partner with researchers since rigorous impact evaluation requires a deep-seated commitment, including buy-in from the partner’s senior leadership, program managers, and sometimes, key stakeholders, including donors.

Another requirement to have a true interest in learning how one’s programs are working and letting this information become publicly available when the results of the impact evaluation are published and presented.

Note that the organization and project implementation team must be ready to work constructively on an impact evaluation, including potential changes to implementation plans.

When is the deadline?

The deadline for the submission of expressions of interest is on Friday, January 8, 2021. Each submission must adhere to the guidelines stated in the Expressions of Interest application form. EOIs should be submitted as a Word document by email to Amy Copley at [email protected]

Don’t miss important articles during the week. Subscribe to techbuild weekly digest for updates.