Rural Communities: Empower Women, And Children Will Be Fed

"Promoting gender equality and empowering women" is one among the eight Millennium Development goals that was recognized by world leaders at the turn of the century. Despite considerable progress, such as eliminating the gap in primary school enrollment rates between girls and boys, gender inequality persists in many places and in many forms. As a result, many development programs and policy instruments include "women's empowerment" as one of their key objectives. Empowering women entails giving them greater agency, enabling them to make important decisions that will determine the course of their lives (such as the timing of marriage, who to marry or the types of work they do).

Often, such policy interventions aim at lead to improvements in other development indicators, such as a reduction in child mortality and a decrease in malnutrition. The case for the argument rests on a large body of evidence which shows that women's preferences differ from men's, and women place relatively greater weight on child welfare and provision of public goods. As such, giving more decision-making power to women in politics or in the family is likely to lead to greater investment in goods and services that matter for child welfare. This raises two important questions. Firstly, what policies are effective in empowering women and why? Secondly, do policies that empower women also lead to improvements in children's health?

To answer the first question, rigorous evaluations of policies designed to empower women are being conducted throughout the world. Gradually, we are beginning to accumulate a throve of empirical evidence on the effects of different interventions aimed at bettering women's status in various contexts. Results are not always those presumed by policy-makers or suggested by anecdotal evidence. For example, most microfinance organizations give loans primarily to women with the goal of improving their access to credit, allowing them to start their own small-scale businesses, and increasing their bargaining power within the household. However, recent randomized evaluations of microfinance in a variety of settings have shown that standard microcredit programs have modest take-up and little or no impact on women's decision-making power. One reason may be women are not only credit-constrained, but they are also held back by lack of human capital and constraint of social norms. Tackling each separately is not likely to yield transformative effects on women's lives, if other constraints continue to bind them. In fact, evaluations of other types of development programs that tackle one constraint at a time (e.g. business training programs, conditional or unconditional cash transfer programs) often report weak or no impact on women's empowerment and child health.

Guided by the idea that empowering women requires a holistic approach that tackles all of the potential constraints that women have to face, in 2002 a Bangladeshi NGO named BRAC launched a new program called "Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP)"( https://tup.brac.net/ ). The program targets the poorest women in rural communities and provides them with a combination of asset transfers (productive assets, such as livestock), business training and supervision, healthcare, consumption support, savings, community support, and training on legal rights. In a joint work with Oriana Bandiera (LSE), Robin Burgess (LSE), Narayan Das (BRAC), Imran Rasul (UCL) and Munshi Sulaiman (BRAC), we evaluate BRAC's TUP program in Bangladesh. To do so, we collaborated with BRAC to randomize the roll-out of their program across the different areas being targeted. In 2007, BRAC provided us with a list of areas where they wanted to introduce the TUP program. We randomly selected half of these areas as "treatment" and the program started operations there immediately. The remaining areas did not receive the program until 2011. In order to measure the effects of the program, we compared the outcomes in these areas to those in "treatment" areas. We found that four years after its inception, the program led to large improvements in women's earnings, labor supply, wealth and consumption.

Moreover, the program led to an improvement in women's nutritional status (as measured by their body-mass index) and reduced child mortality in targeted households. The results are promising. They suggest that a holistic approach to kick-start female-owned businesses has succeed in economically empowering poor women in Bangladesh and improving their own and their children's nutritional status. Today, the program is being replicated as pilot studies are being launched in several countries. As results from these pilots become available, we will understand if the same approach works in other contexts.