Population
Health
Well-Being
Gender Dividend
Quick Facts
Location
Piloted in Liberia, with a Pan-African scope for future expansion
Leads
Mahesh Karra and Joshua Wilde, with World Bank co-authors (Wendy Cunningham, Mitja Del Bono, Sarika Gupta)
Prospective Consortium Collaborators
AFIDEP, AidData, and EconInsight are prospective consortium collaborators (along with PRB and EVIHDAF) as we look to expand to additional countries.
The Specifics
What are we doing
What Are We Doing
We extended the CKW Demographic Dividend macrosimulation model to quantify the economic cost of excluding women from the economy - estimating the value of women's market and non-market (including unpaid and informal) production, and simulating the economic gains available from closing specific gender gaps in education, labor force participation, and wages.
What We Learned
Learnings
In Liberia, we estimate that women were responsible for roughly 39 percent of market-based output in 2020 (about $1.08 billion), and that closing key gender gaps could increase Liberia's GDP by as much as 23.7 percent. That gives us a concrete, quantified "business case" for investing in gender equity - not just a normative one.
The Impact
Impact
Published as a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, this work is now informing conversations with the World Bank and other partners about applying the same approach in additional countries. The underlying dividend modeling approach has also recently fed into the Gates Foundation's return-on-investment estimates for family planning (see the Demographic Dividend impact note above), reinforcing the case for pairing gender-gap-closing investments with family planning access.
Research & Publications
2015
Economic Effects of the Demographic Dividend," in Africa's Demographic Transition: Dividend or Disaster?
2017
The Effect of Fertility Decline on Economic Growth in Africa: A Macrosimulation Model," Population and Development Review
Author(s)
Canning, Karra, and Wilde
Author(s
Karra, Canning, and Wilde
2023
Liberian Women Count: Evidence from a Macrosimulation of the Gender Dividend