Women's and girls’ empowerment (WGE) is a key priority for the World Bank's engagement in the Africa region. Gender equality has long been central to the World Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The Bank has made substantial investments aimed at closing...

Christian missions, especially Protestants missions, have been shown to advance longrun education outcomes and gender equality in Africa. However, the mechanisms behind this benign legacy and the contribution of missionary women, who constituted more than half of all Western mission staff, are...

Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an...

African elections often reveal low levels of political accountability. We assess different forms of voter education during an election in Mozambique. Three interventions providing information to voters and calling for their electoral participation were randomized; an SMS-based information...

Incumbent politicians in African countries have been cementing their positions in recent elections. That was the case of the Mozambican election of 2009, where the ruling party secured 75 percent of the vote, amid low participation and clear challenges of political accountability. We conducted a...