Gender and Poverty Fireside Chat

Join the Global Human Development Program and experts from the International Food Policy Research Institute and the World Bank to learn about careers in gender and international development, and to get an overview of how far gender considerations in development have come (and how far there is to go), as well as what kind of tools, skills and attitudes might help the next generation of development practitioners to close the remaining gap.

Agnes Quisumbing is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, working on gender, intrahousehold allocation, women’s empowerment, property rights, poverty, and economic mobility. She tested models of household decision making using primary data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, and her native Philippines and has conducted longitudinal studies analyzing gendered patterns of asset accumulation. She co-developed metrics to evaluate agricultural development projects’ impacts on women’s empowerment and gender equality, including the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and the project-level WEAI (pro-WEAI). She is a 2021 Honorary Life Member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists and Visiting Professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics.

Jonna Lundwall is a Senior Social Scientist in the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice. She has worked on gender equality, social and economic inclusion and monitoring and evaluation with a focus on evidence-based policy making in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and in the Middle East and North Africa region. Since 2017, Lundwall is the technical Gender Lead for the MENA region, working on regional and country-level gender issues, through analytical and operational work to enhance women’s economic opportunities. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2007, she worked at UNDP Honduras, and has also worked as a UN Coordination Specialist in Bolivia. She holds a master’s degree in political science from Uppsala University, Sweden.