Yemen Emergency Crisis Response Project: Women in Crisis Cash-for-Work

Approved on 20 July 2016 with an initial US$50 million IDA grant, the Yemen Emergency Crisis Response Project (YECRP, World Bank project P159053) is implemented via Yemen's Social Fund for Development and Public Works Project, with UNDP, amid a civil conflict that stripped an estimated 8 million Yemenis of their livelihoods. Through five-plus additional financings, project funding grew to US$871.72 million by a 2020 World Bank status report.
The project pays short-term wages for work such as stone-paving, school-painting and craft production, and recruits women as community health and nutrition educators. A March 2021 World Bank feature reported about 423,000 total participants, 22.8% (roughly 96,000) of them women, and documented an individual case: Wasila, 27, displaced to a camp west of Taiz city, earning about 18,000 Yemeni riyals (around US$6) per week through paving, painting and craft work.
Women's inclusion is a secondary, partial outcome of an emergency-infrastructure project rather than a dedicated gender objective — women remained under a quarter of participants. A separate UNDP fact sheet on the same project, dated differently, cites different overall figures (US$300 million financing, about 400,000 people employed, 2.5 million gaining access to services) and reports no gender breakdown at all, a genuine gap in consistent gender-disaggregated monitoring.
Funding figures vary widely across reporting years (US$50 million to US$300 million to US$400 million to US$871.72 million) due to repeated restructuring, complicating any single stable comparison. The work itself is short-term and low-paid (about US$6/week in the documented case), raising legitimate doubts about durable economic empowerment versus emergency relief, and ongoing conflict with divided governance constrains independent verification of results on the ground.

Read the full analysis: https://yemen.un.org/en/17385-yemen-emergency-crisis-response-project-yecrp-report