AfDB unveils its 2021-2025 gender strategy

The African Development Bank (AfDB) unveiled on February 3 its new roadmap to strengthen gender equality by 2025. A strategy focused on 5 priorities for an amount of 5 billion dollars.

The objective of this five-year strategy is to “transform the continent’s key sectors into accessible areas of opportunity where women, girls, men and boys, regardless of their origin, have equal access and control over productive resources and benefit from infrastructure and services to flourish,” the AfDB said in a press release. 5 billion dollars of financing will be released over the next few years as part of the implementation of this plan.

The 5 priorities or “High 5” of this new strategy for the next five years are, in particular:

1. Mainstreaming gender in all country and regional operations, including by striving to rank 100% of its public sector operations using the GMS (Gender marker system).

2. Making the necessary investments in deploying gender specialists, creating gender equality knowledge products and building the capacity of AfDB staff to ensure that women, men, boys and girls benefit equally from bank-financed operations.

3. Prioritizing interventions that enhance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls and where the bank can add value

4.Strengthening the gender approach in the member countries and carrying out interventions taking into account the contexts and priorities of each country.

5. Mobilization in the post-Covid-19 socio-economic recovery process in favor of women, girls and youth through the funding of short- and long-term gender-sensitive interventions.

The institution is also committed to building the capacity of financial institutions operating in Africa to adapt their products and services to the types of businesses managed by women, particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It further stresses that it will implement this strategy while respecting its commitments at the level of the African Development Fund (ADF) and those related to the general capital increase of the bank.