World Development Report:

World Development Report: 2012 – Gender Equality and Development

A Review by Dr. S. Sridevi, Assistant Professor of English,  

Chevalier T. Thomas Elizabeth College for Women

Every year, the World Bank publishes its World Development Report (WDR) focusing on a specific development challenge.  In recent years, the WDR has highlighted issues of climate change, agricultural productivity, urbanization, and the inequality of opportunity within and among nations. This year, the Bank has published its World Development Report 2012, which focuses on gender equality claiming it a qualitative study on gender and economic choice. The world Bank encourages dissemination of its work and will normally grant permission to reproduce and hence, and  this year for the first time the WDR is published with a companion mobile app for the iPad with features including access content from the WDR 2012 in multiple ways, available in 7 languages with share and save features all for free.

The President of the World Bank Group Robert  B.  Zoellick puts forward the core values as reducing gender gaps in the following areas: human capital, economic opportunities, voice and agency and limiting the reproduction of gender equality of generations. He says gender equality is at the heart of development paving the way to development policy making and programming. The Bank has taken the framework of Amartya Sen to form its core development and that is a reassuring point for Indians in terms of intellectual acknowledgement of the West  of Indian contribution as well as the fact that Sen has a deep understanding of socio-economic factors of Asian countries.  From Sen’s perspective, it sees development as a process of expanding freedom equally for all people.  Field research has been conducted in 10 countries in all regions and the findings are: In terms of education, girls have made great strides. But the most alarming statistics are with respect to the roughly 4 million deaths of women and girls, relative to males, in low and middle income countries.  40 percent of these “missing girls” are never born: the spread of inexpensive sonogram technology allows parents to abort unwanted female fetuses. Another 17 percent die in early childhood. Some 35 percent die during their reproductive years. Maternal mortality, which takes approximately 1000 female lives a day, is still the top killer of women in many countries.

The WDR 2012 is a useful contribution by the World Bank to take stock of the gains women have made around the world and the challenges they still face. The Bank’s framing of gender equality not only as a development objective in its own right, but also as smart economics, is an important message for those countries that lag the most on gender equality. Just as investing in women and girls can create a positive development cycle, the opposite is also true: countries that fail to empower half their population will suffer from lower productivity, slower economic growth, and weaker development outcomes. WDR has put forward questions: What needs to be done in the following areas for balanced development in terms of education and economic progress? Which gender gaps are the most significant?  Which of these gaps persist?  Which of these priority areas has there been insufficient?

The Report has an extensive bibliographical note that shows scores of people have been involved in the project of preparing the report, references,  detailed tables and a detailed  background papers and notes that shows how the statistics have been sourced from well researched reports and books, and the writers show the source at every diagram and graph meticulously. For example, where marital relationships are influenced by ‘patrilocal’ customs – when the wife moves to the husband’s family home – laws may reflect the prevailing social norm. In Nigeria women’s work is not specifically restricted under statutory law, but customary law and religious law prevail for the majority of the population.  In rural Ethiopia, [Amhara and Hadiya], where the family code was reformed in 2000 and where fewer women are living with their husband’s family,  48 percent of women felt they needed their husband’s permission to work far fewer than the 90 percent of women in Northern India [Uttar Pradesh] and Nigeria [Maguzawa and Hausa] and 75 percent in Southern India [Tamil Nadu].  In the Ethiopian capital, the percentage dropped to 28 percent, suggesting that urbanization and changing family structures can influence norms. The layout of the volume is reader friendly attracting the reader to quotes of the human samples for research projected in colourful display, summing up of the chapters in charted out and classified points and presentation of materials in an encyclopedic way of preciseness are some of the few things we have to mention. Great care has been taken to make it a reader-friendly document.