The World Bank is conducting a formal consultation on its new gender strategy concluding 15th July. Led by Caren Grown, the Bank’s gender director, the strategy will focus on increased employment and property ownership for women. The strategy is expected to be published during the final quarter of 2015.

Ongoing concerns that the Bank’s practices don’t match its rhetoric have again been voiced (see Bulletin March 2015). Winnie Byanyima, executive director of NGO Oxfam and a member of the World Bank’s Gender in Development advisory group, criticised the absence of a gender safeguard from the World Bank’s new draft safeguards framework. In a March blog for the Huffington Post with activist Gloria Steinem and Marcela Tovar-Restrepo of Women’s Environment and Development Organization, Byanyima wrote: “we cannot continue to believe that the World Bank is taking its commitment to gender equality seriously.”