By fortunate coincidence, the independent evaluation offices of four multilateral development banks (MDBs) recently assessed progress in their institutions’ gender and development work over roughly the same period—offering a unique opportunity to compare findings and draw new insights. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the World Bank completed their evaluations in 2024. The European Investment Bank (EIB) did so in March 2025. All evaluations covered the six-year period between 2016 and 2023, with IFAD and the World Bank extending back to 2012 to capture a full decade.
On November 5, the heads of these evaluation offices discussed striking similar findings at a CGD-hosted virtual event. This summary highlights the common findings, explores the dynamics behind them, and concludes with suggestions for the way forward. We begin by outlining shared institutional features that make these comparisons possible.
Common features
Shared objectives—supported by policies, strategies, or action plans—tagging tools, and institutional structure frame MDBs’ gender work.
The four MDBs emphasize the business case for gender equality and women’s empowerment, the two principal objectives. A third shared goal is promoting women’s leadership. ADB and IFAD also explicitly aim to reduce women’s time poverty and drudgery.
ADB’s evaluation succinctly states this business case: “Pursuing gender equality is not only a core human rights obligation but also a strategic imperative. Gender equality helps boost economic growth, improves governance, promotes social cohesion, and improves well-being for all.”
The MDBs rely on well-developed policy frameworks, gender strategies, or gender action plans to guide their work—though ADB’s 1998 gender policy requires updating (noted in the evaluation) and the EIB has relied on consecutive action plans without an overarching gender policy.
All four MDBs use ex-ante gender tagging or scoring tools at the design stage to assess how well operations integrate gender objectives. While the specifics differ, each institution assigns a numerical score, with higher scores indicating stronger gender integration. ADB, IFAD and the World Bank used such tags throughout the evaluation period; the EIB introduced its ex-ante tagging tool in 2021.
Shared structural features also shape gender work. All MDBs put a premium on loan preparation and approval—the “bread and butter” of any bank—and add knowledge and technical expertise across sectors, including gender.
Common findings
The evaluations find substantial progress in gender mainstreaming, but mainly in breadth rather than depth, in design rather than implementation, and with limited success in policy dialogue and scaling up.
By 2023, gender integration in project design had expanded significantly: 99 percent of the operations at the ADB and 93 percent at the World Bank incorporated some gender elements at entry (from 49 percent at the ADB and 44 percent at the World Bank in 2012). At IFAD, 44 percent of approved operations in 2023 included gender equality and women’s empowerment objectives. While the EIB lacks comparable numerical scores, the evaluation identifies meaningful progress since the EIB approved its first gender action plan in 2016, particularly in global (rather than EU-based) operations.
However, this expansion has come at the expense of depth. The incentives created by design-stage scoring encourage compliance with meeting minimum quality standards across all operations—raising coverage (breadth) but at the cost of higher-quality, gender-relevant operations (depth). For example, at the World Bank, the share of low-scoring projects—which may track female beneficiaries and include women in consultations but do not address gender inequalities—increased over higher-scoring, more ambitious action.
Getting the design of operations right has prevailed over ensuring effective project implementation. The evaluations point to gaps in implementers’ gender skills, insufficient financial resources to support skilled implementers, inadequate systems for measuring results and accountability, and weak senior management support. All highlight persistent under-resourcing of gender work, leading to deficits in gender training and expertise throughout the loan cycle but especially during implementation.
Underlying dynamics
MDB incentive structure, gender data gaps, and the challenge to measure results (outcomes), gender mainstreaming practices, and reliance on the ex-ante gender tag collectively reinforce an emphasis on design over implementation, breadth over depth.
Incentives and gender data gaps. The premium MDBs place on loan approvals skews performance incentives toward having good designs, which, in the case of gender, is reinforced by the ex-ante gender tag that scores the incorporation of gender actions in the design of operations. Shifting attention to implementation and outcomes or impacts is further hampered by limited access to robust sex-disaggregated data to measure results. Without reliable baselines or outcome measures, operations fall back on reporting tag scores and outputs, reinforcing the design focus. All evaluations identified persistent gender data gaps as a barrier to assessing progress.
Gender mainstreaming practices. Not all MDB operations are suited for gender objectives (as the World Bank evaluation notes), yet the widely accepted practice—endorsed by the UN in 1997—has been to mainstream gender across the board, encouraging overextension and reinforcing breadth over depth of integration. Mainstreaming, originally intended as a means to achieve gender equality through lending operations, has often become an end in itself. The gender tag—meant to guide designs—has been misinterpreted as a performance metric or scorecard. At the World Bank, it pushes projects over the minimum line, and at the ADB, it adds meaningless gender indicators to secure loan approvals. The IFAD evaluation found that budget and time allocated to project design decreased as compliance with gender mainstreaming increased.
Gender transformative approaches. ADB, IFAD, and the World Bank have increased their ambitions by calling for gender-transformative work that addresses the root causes of gender inequality, challenges unequal power relations, and moves beyond process-based achievements towards lasting measurable outcomes. But the implementation and data requirements of these approaches further challenge MDBs’ existing capacity to do gender work. Transformational changes are multidimensional, complex, and context-specific, and require a coordinated country-driven program or policy approach with a long time frame and at scale. Incorporating gender in the policy dialogue with countries has had limited success—noted in the evaluations— and the few transformative operations are rarely implemented at scale. Measuring transformative changes—particularly changes in women’s agency—adds further complexity to already significant data constraints. (Whether these approaches are overly ambitious given MDBs’ capacities and constraints is a question for another blog.)
Conclusion
The shared findings and recommendations from these four independent evaluations point to several ways MDBs can strengthen gender and development work:
- Make a deliberate effort to realign built-in incentives to reward strong implementation and measurable outcomes, not only strong design. Options include expanding results-based lending, conducting at-exit gender assessments (already used by the ADB), and significantly strengthening M&E systems for gender work. Greater investment in M&E, including impact evaluations, should help shift attention toward results. A challenging question is whether the MDBs need to continue using ex-ante tagging to encourage the integration of gender issues in design.
- Invest in gender data to strengthen M&E systems: improve sex-disaggregated data to close gender data gaps, develop reliable and comparable indicators to measure outcomes and proxy indicators to capture changes in women’s agency, and define high-level metrics for results-based reporting. MDBs are well-positioned—working with the UN and national statistical agencies—to advance parsimonious, comparable, and actionable indicators for gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.
- Move away from blanket gender mainstreaming and prioritize clearly defined objectives at MDB and country levels and allocate more resources for priority operations.
- Strengthen the policy dialogue with countries, making the business case for gender and expanding the use of policy-based lending to help remove structural barriers to gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. This shift should support more transformative outcomes.
Aligning evaluation efforts across these MDBs has offered new insights and created significant knowledge value. In the current challenging fiscal environment, greater coordination among MDBs and more deliberate efforts to help countries tackle gender inequalities and empower women economically are smart economics and should benefit everyone.
