Resource information
Poverty reduction is the overarching
objective of the World Bank Group and is reflected in the
institution s commitment to the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs). More recently, the twin goals of the institution,
eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared
prosperity, expressed a renewed commitment toward the Bank
Group s vision of a world free of poverty. This message is
intimately related to another main goal of the institution:
advancing gender equality. The shared prosperity goal calls
for ensuring that men and women and boys and girls are
included in the development process. This review focuses on
a core set of poverty reduction interventions: Social Safety
Net (SSN) programs. SSNs, a subset of social protection
programs, are noncontributory transfer programs. Their main
objective is to protect the poor against destitution and
promoting equality of opportunity. The need to integrate
gender considerations into the design of SSNs (and social
protection interventions more generally) is an explicit
objective of the World Bank Social Protection (SP) strategy.
This report analyzes whether SSN interventions produce
results and help to improve gender equality for men and
women and boys and girls, either as a deliberate outcome or
as an unplanned consequence. The report discusses whether
SSN interventions aim to empower women and achieve greater
gender equality, or impact other gender outcomes as one of
their main goals. The report also looks at what type of
actions and indicators these interventions adopt and what
results they obtain. The report reviews evidence of results
on SSN-specific outcomes.
