Volume 5, Number 1
July 1999

World Bank Activities

Lynn Brown of the World Bank noted that the Bank's Development Forum, part of its external website, allows people to engage in discussion on a number of topics, including those related to preparation of the annual World Development Report. The Report for 2000/2001 will focus on poverty, and the website discussion lasted for approximately three months beginning February 1. Discussions focused on gender and law and ending violence against women. You can access the site at www.worldbank.org and follow the Development Forum link to join discussions. There are also links to discussions of gender outside the World Bank.

Ewa Charkiewicz, coordinator of the World Bank External Gender Consultative Group (EGCG), noted that the World Bank had started preparing a Policy Research Report (PRR) on gender that will be published in Spring 2000. PRR is a major state-of-the-art review that provides the conceptual underpinnings for policy development. (The PRRs produced by the World Bank have addressed topics such as AIDS, the East-Asian miracle, and structural adjustment in Africa.) The preparations for PRR provided an opportunity for outsiders to influence the development of a framework for integrating gender into World Bank policies and lending. On the initiative of EGCG, an ad-hoc working group made up of civil society and Bank representatives was convened to facilitate public dialogue on the gender PRR, and a workshop on the report was held on November 10-11, 1998 in Washington, D.C. A draft outline of the PRR, written by Elizabeth King and Andrew Mason of the World Bank, was circulated for comments last fall.