Webinar Discusses Ways to Close the Gender Gap through Quality Infrastructure Development

Lack of access to quality infrastructure has deprived women and girls of education, employment, and many other opportunities. The event addressed questions such as how to accelerate gender mainstreaming and integrate gender considerations into infrastructure development as well as how to ensure women’s participation in decision-making processes. Three speakers shared their views on these questions.

Mary Chege, founding member of the African Union Commission’s African Network for Women in Infrastructure (ANWIN), gave the first presentation. She presented key statistics supporting the case for promoting gender equality on business and moral grounds. From the business perspective, she presented evidence demonstrating that as many as 60% of households in sub-Saharan Africa still lack on-site drinking water, forcing women to collectively spend an unpaid 16 million hours collecting water each day. If women spent this time participating in the economy as equals to men, they would contribute $28 trillion dollars to global GDP by 2025. From the moral perspective, she noted that building resilient infrastructure with 20- to 50-year operational life cycles without gender considerations will reinforce existing gender inequalities for decades to come. She also stated that each stage of an infrastructure project (enabling environment assessment, planning and design, tendering, construction, and operation and maintenance) must be well designed and implemented for the benefit of women.

Pierre Boissesons, an economist at the OECD Development Centre, gave the final presentation. He said that we need to understand that infrastructure is designed by men and for men's needs, and that historically, infrastructure design has been based on norms shaped by men. He blamed the lack of adequate sanitation facilities at schools in many developing countries as a significant barrier to education, preventing girls who are menstruating from attending school. He blamed this on the faulty design of school buildings. Therefore, improving basic infrastructure, such as sanitation facilities and water facilities, could have a profound impact on social life, spurring changes to traditional social norms that define the roles of men and women in the household. Also, he emphasized that for such change to occur, it is necessary to harness the digitalization of the economy, which he sees as a major opportunity for developing countries in coming years. He further stated that skill development will be central to ensuring that women benefit from Information and Communication Technology infrastructure. In addition, he argued that women are vastly under-represented in the STEM fields, and that any attempt to improve digital infrastructure and transform the economy must include substantial efforts to shift the fundamental norms that prevent women from joining the sector.

After the presentations, each speaker presented more specific ideas for improving gender equality. This was followed by a lively exchange of opinions.