Investing in Opportunities for All Croatia Country Gender Assessment

The Croatia Country Gender Assessment reviewed the state of equality between women and men in Croatia in endowments, economic opportunities, and voice and agency. Overall, the country has made progress on including gender equality both institutionally and legally into its policy agenda. Certain indicators of gender equality remain strong, such as equitable primary and secondaryschool enrollment for boys and girls. A closer look reveals areas that need to be improved, such as equality in the labor market, women's entrepreneurship and role in politics and business, the situation of Roma women, rural and urban disparities, care work distribution between men and women, and the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people.The most significant gap is in access to economic opportunities, with a large number of women, youth, retirees, and minorities excluded from the labor market. Sustainable and effective solutions for this complex issue lie in a whole of government effort covering education andskills development, including retraining and lifelong learning; equity in healthcare; provision of care services to enable women to enter the labor market; and inclusive entrepreneurship. The findings are in line with some of the issues raised in the Croatia Systematic Country Diagnostic of the World Bank; this assessment unpacks these issues in more detail and identifies additional areas for attention. The World Bank could use its engagement with the Government of Croatia to advocate for these issues, and to look for entry points in its current portfolio and pipeline. To this end, a Gender Roadmap has been developed under the Country Partnership Framework (2019-2024) that will focus on how some of the gender gaps could be reduced through the Bank's current and future engagements, and progress tracked periodically. It shows a commitment by the Bank to follow up on the findings and the recommendations arising from this assessment. The conclusions have been arrived at using mixed methods, supplementing quantitative sources with qualitative tools. The assessment is also innovative in highlighting the intersectionality of overlapping disadvantages arising from social and spatial exclusion. It does this by bringing in voices of the youth, elderly women, Roma, and LGBTI from Slavonia (one of the least-developed parts of the country), and Zagreb (the most developed). For instance, the cumulative disadvantages for an elderly rural woman in less-developed Slavonia is not the same as that for a woman of similar age in the capital Zagreb.