How can we use Results-Based Financing—or RBF—to support stronger gender outcomes in Urban, Resilience, and Land programs?

June 10, 2025|Feature Stories

The answer: Gender-responsive Results-Based Financing. At first, that might sound like a technical concept. But in reality, it’s about using our tools and financing structures to help shift systems that have long left women and girls behind. It’s about turning good intentions into measurable, meaningful progress, especially in the foundational sectors many of us work on.

We know there’s still a long way to go. Girls face barriers to education. Women have less access to jobs, own fewer assets, and carry most of the unpaid care work. And too often, they’re excluded from decisions that affect their lives - whether in households, communities, or institutions.

These challenges are not side issues. They are at the heart of development.

And that’s exactly the focus of the World Bank’s new Gender Strategy. To close gender gaps by moving from intention to impact. That means investing in areas where we can achieve strategic, measurable outcomes, and applying a gender lens across our operations from the start.

RBF can help us do this. When disbursements are tied to gender-related results, we see sharper focus, stronger delivery, and more accountability. We need to embed gender outcomes into financing—not as an add-on, but as a core objective.

It means starting every RBF operation with a gender lens; not tacking it on at the end. It means using sex-disaggregated data to shape the design, not just monitor the results.

So what does this look like in practice? Check out this informative session that was held on June 3 where we heard from presenters share about how we can use "RBF for better gender outcomes":