Accelerating Gender Equality Through Social Protection

The World Bank’s Gender Strategy (2024-2030) aims to tackle both formal and informal barriers to gender inequality, including power imbalances that often affect women and girls disproportionally. To achieve enduring gender equality, there must be collective action to influence transformative changes in laws, policies, and programming grounded in a deeper understanding of the interaction between different actors and stakeholders at the individual, household, community, and institutional levels. This note outlines how social protection contributes to the objectives of the World Bank’s Gender Strategy, which are to end GBV and elevate human capital, expand and enable economic opportunities, and engage women as leaders. This note presents evidence and operational experience on how social protection can boost gender equality and women and girls’ empowerment outcomes and discusses challenges that need to be addressed to maximize the impact of social protection interventions at scale. Recommendations are offered on ways to further amplify gender equality outcomes.