Actionable Gender Mainstreaming: A Framework for Women’s Inclusion in Development Projects in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States

Identified as "key enablers" of development by the 2015 UN Women led “Global Review” on implementation of UNSCR 1325, the World Bank is uniquely poised to support the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda due to its focus on women’s inclusion and needs by mainstreaming gender in development projects. Due to limited investigation on how Bank financing promotes UNSCR 1325, this paper works to untangle if and how projects in fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS) are gender mainstreamed (GM). By, analyzing Bank mainstreaming activity in project documentation of sixteen Sub-Saharan African countries from 1990-2014 via textual analysis and quantitative modeling, argues current frameworks for assessing GM activity fail to capture the whole of mainstreaming taking place. Thus, they are insufficient in adequately and accurately evaluating GM of development projects in FCAS. The framework of “Actionable Gender Mainstreaming” (AGM) sets a new threshold for implementing and evaluating GM in practice, focusing on identifying actionable items in project plans that produce tangible outcomes. Despite and institutional commitment to gender equality and women's inclusion, the data illustrates little difference in GM activity, taking place in less than a third of projects, and remaining relatively stagnant over the 25-year period in these conflict-affected states.