A series of evaluations conducted by the World Bank’s Opera- tions Evaluation Department has shown that attention to gender issues helps to enhance the Bank’s development effectiveness. A 1997 desk review of projects conducted in the mid-1990s found that Bank projects that took gender relations into account in their design and implementation tended to achieve their objectives more often than projects that ignored gender issues. 26 A recent desk review of a variety of Bank instruments concluded that countries in which Country Gender Assessments had been performed tended to have a more thorough and effective treatment of gender issues in other ana- lytical work and in projects. 27 Likewise, an analysis by.
