IDB COVID-19 Response Projects and Gender Integration

This paper aims to determine the extent to which gender was considered in the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) operations aimed at responding to the COVID pandemic and associated economic crisis. Using keywords to identify COVID response projects, we found 264 projects approved between March 1, 2020, and July 31, 2021 for our analysis. We found that 135 projects (51 percent) had publicly available project documents for analysis, and of these, 32 projects (24 percent) included gender-focused indicators in their results frameworks. Most gender indicators focus on women as participants of social protection programs or as owners of small- and medium-sized enterprises. Our recommendations to the IDB include increasing transparency by publishing more project documents and ensuring gender indicators are included in projects’ results frameworks across sectors. This project builds on previous analysis of gender integration in COVID response projects at the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and African Development Bank.