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 gaps between men and women as well as advancing our understanding of what are the most effective ways to close those gaps. However, only recently has the Bank recognized women's and girls' empowerment as a policy goal in its own right and a key strategy for human capital development in Africa. This highlights the need for guidance and tools to help task teams operationalize the WGE agenda in the region. This measurement guide offers practical advice on how to assess changes in WGE in SPJ operations. The guide aims to provide task teams with a set of essential WGE indicators and with the guidance on how to measure them. The four indicators are 'essential' because they represent the minimum needed to measure the different aspects of empowerment
however, project teams are encouraged to supplement them with additional indicators to reflect specific projects and circumstances. The guide fills the gap on outcome, rather than output, indicators to be included in project results frameworks. It distills the rich information on WGE measurement that is already available with the goal of making it accessible to non-research users. It further aims to enable a standardized approach to measuring progress on WGE across the Bank's portfolio. A list of resources for that purpose is provided in annex one. The remainder of the guide focuses on the four essential indicators for measuring progress on WGE. Section two presents the methodology that was used to select these indicators, while section three describes each indicator. Section four provides detailed guidance on how to collect and analyze the resulting data, and Section five concludes.