Not a single country in the world guarantees all the legal rights women need to participate fully in the economy, and in most nations the laws that do exist on paper are enforced barely half the time, the World Bank Group has found in a landmark new report released on Tuesday.
The Women, Business and the Law 2026 report, which for the first time measures not only the quality of gender-equal legislation but also the extent to which it is enforced, found that laws encouraging full economic participation by women are only half-enforced on average. Even if those laws were fully enforced, women would still enjoy barely two-thirds of the legal rights of men.
The global index returned an average score of 67 out of 100 for legal rights, which dropped to 53 when enforcement was measured, and fell further to 47 when the adequacy of supportive policies and institutions was assessed. Fewer than five percent of women worldwide live in economies approaching full legal equality.
The findings carry direct implications for Ghana and the broader Sub-Saharan Africa region, which the report identifies as simultaneously among the areas most in need of women’s workforce participation and among those with the largest legal and enforcement barriers. Despite these barriers, Sub-Saharan Africa led all regions in the volume of legal reforms enacted, with 68 economies globally passing 113 legal reforms between October 2023 and October 2025. Countries leading those reforms included Egypt, Madagascar, Somalia, Oman, Jordan and Kyrgyzstan.
The report, covering 190 economies and drawing on input from more than 2,600 legal experts, academics, civil society representatives, and public officials, assessed women’s economic opportunities across 10 categories: safety, mobility, work, pay, marriage, parenthood, childcare, entrepreneurship, assets, and pensions.
Safety emerged as the most critical global failure. Only about a third of the safety laws needed to protect women are in place globally, and even where they exist, enforcement fails roughly 80 percent of the time. World Bank Chief Economist Indermit Gill said the scale of the enforcement failure was striking. “On paper, most countries are doing reasonably well. But when it comes to enforcing the laws, the average score drops sharply. These gaps represent lost growth opportunities for developing economies,” he said.
Childcare and entrepreneurship access were identified as the other two most deficient areas globally. Fewer than half of the 190 economies surveyed provide any form of financial or tax support for families with childcare needs, and only 30 percent of the childcare policies needed are in place. In low-income economies, that figure collapses to just one percent. On entrepreneurship, although women can legally establish businesses in most countries, only about half of economies actively promote equal access to credit, leaving many women-led enterprises locked out of commercial financing.
For Ghana, the report’s findings intersect directly with the country’s current economic reform agenda. The government’s 2026 budget allocated GH¢2.3 billion to the Ghana Medical Trust Fund and identified women-led micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) as a core target for the Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA). However, the World Bank report warns that financing access alone is insufficient if enforcement mechanisms for equal pay, property rights, and safety protections remain weak at the institutional level.
The report’s lead author Tea Trumbic said with 1.2 billion young people expected to enter the global workforce over the next decade, half of them women, closing the enforcement gap is an economic priority, not merely a social one. “The gross domestic product (GDP) boost from women’s participation is most needed in regions where barriers are highest,” she said.
