Search

• We examine the impact of the 2017 flood in Bangladesh on time use, women's empowerment, and income-generating activities (IGA). • After the flood, women spend less time on domestic work and more on IGA, while men engage more in domestic work. • These results are confirmed only for individuals who experienced another flooding event occurred in 2014. • The response to the 2017 shock depends on the 2014 shock's long-term effects on women's economic autonomy and empowerment. • Repeated exposure to negative shocks can enhance women's empowerment by improving their economicautonomy within the household. In low- and middle-income countries, differences between men and women in their time use patterns represent a major source of gender inequality. Among other factors, natural shocks can affect these differences. This paper examines the impact of the 2017 flood in Bangladesh on men's and women's time use patterns and women's empowerment. Using georeferenced and longitudinal data, we find that the flood decreased women's time spent on domestic work while increasing their engagement in income generating activities and empowerment. In contrast, men spent less time at work and increased their participation in domestic work to substitute for women's. These responses to the shock are confirmed only for those individuals who were exposed to another flooding event that occurred in 2014. To better understand the underlying mechanisms, we look at the long-term impact of the 2014 flood on women's empowerment and on their engagement in income generating activities, and we find that the shock still positively affects both variables. These results suggest that when an increase in empowerment naturally occurs within the household, it persists over time and influences reactions to subsequent shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women’s empowerment is an indicator of social change and a priority of the Sustainable Development Goals. Debate continues on what domains constitute women’s empowerment and how to measure empowerment across countries. Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are the most widely available source of data on women’s empowerment. However, measurement invariance often is assumed, but not tested. We used DHS data from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda to test factor structure and measurement invariance of women’s empowerment among married women ages 15–49. Factor analysis confirmed a three-latent-domain model of women’s empowerment in each country capturing women’s human/social assets, gender attitudes related to wife abuse, and women’s participation in household decisions. Multi-country confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) identified an invariant three-factor model of women’s empowerment and a subset of country-specific items. Our results offer a standardized, invariant measure of women’s empowerment that can be applied to monitor women’s empowerment cross-nationally in East Africa, and possibly beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The Participatory Development (PD) approach aims at improving the quality of governance by empowering local populations. Particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), PD is regarded an opportunity to help shift from unjustified centralization to more decentralized forms of governance. Yet, PD projects are frequently fraught with undesired effects of elite capture which critics ascribe to insufficient appreciation of local context. Our study adopts a sequential quantitative–qualitative mixed method approach to broaden the empirical foundation needed for context sensitive project design. By exploring the effects of gender and employment on community participation we contribute to narrowing two research gaps: First, political science research on female participation in SSA has mostly focused on participation in national-level processes. Second, while development economics literature has devoted much attention on effects of female employment on intra-household bargaining, it has so far omitted the question what this means for the empowerment of women beyond the household, that is in the public life of their communities. Analyzing original survey data of over 1,300 respondents, collected across four urban municipalities in Togo, we find that unemployment negatively impacts community participation. Specifically, we show that this effect is mainly driven by female unemployment and establish self-efficacy driven by norm perception as the causal link between female employment and participation. Complementing our quantitative findings with data from 98 qualitative interviews, we show that employment constitutes an important psychological resource that enables women to overcome multiple discrimination barriers to community participation. However, this effect is stronger for women in a formal employment situation than for those working in less formalized settings. We conclude that gender-targeted employment interventions can help to increase community participation. We recommend that such efforts should not fixate on the creation of female job opportunities but also seek to strengthen the role of female informal workers in local political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Aspirations are often missing from women's empowerment models and measures. • Aspirations are related to agency, but they are more than how women make decisions, a common domain of women's empowerment. • The A-WEAI does not capture key domains of empowerment for ethnic minority women in Vietnam. • Without understanding women's aspirations, programs may not empower women. Empowerment programs for women have been key development initiatives toward achieving gender equality. Projects, models, and measurement tend to focus on resources and agency as core to empowerment. Missing from most models and research is women's own aspirations, or what they value for their futures, that affect how women use their resources and agency to achieve wellbeing. Aspirations are central to a sense of a good life and are necessary to strengthen among poor communities, but they are often overlooked among women, particularly those who are not pursuing formal schooling and who work in informal labor. This paper examines how aspirations matter for women in poverty who are working in informal sectors (agriculture and tourism) in Vietnam. It argues that without examining women's aspirations for themselves, their family, and community, development projects may miss achieving their outcomes because they are not valued by women. Using data from the abbreviated version of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI), and qualitative interview data from women and men from minority ethnic groups in Vietnam, we show that women and men achieve similar rates of adequacy in their access to resources and decision-making as measured by the A-WEAI, and that women's aspirations for themselves and their community emphasized other valued outcomes from projects aimed at economic empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper examines whether education empowers women. We exploit an exogenous variation in education induced by a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We find education reduces the number of live births, increases contraceptive use, and promotes reproductive health practices. However, except for a few outcome measures, we do not find evidence that education improves women’s decision-making authority within households, asset ownership, or community participation. These results suggest that, to some extent, education does empower women in middle-income countries like Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Using a nationally representative survey from Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture, measured using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and per capita calorie availability, dietary diversity, and adult body mass index (BMI). Accounting for potential endogeneity of empowerment, we find that increases in women’s empowerment are positively associated with calorie availability and dietary diversity at the household level. Overall, household wealth, education, and occupation are more important than women’s empowerment as determinants of adult nutritional status, although negative impacts of group membership and credit on male BMI suggest that intrahousehold trade-offs may exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Can membership of self-help groups (SHGs), designed for enhancing livelihoods, create social capital for women? • We find that it can, even when the livelihoods are negligible. • Membership of SHGs increases personal efficacy and propensity for collective action. • Social capital generated by SHG membership is a significant positive impact as it strengthens the process of women's empowerment. The "strength of weak ties" has been established in the context of labour market outcomes, with theoretical and empirical investigation showing how weak ties lead to an increase in mobility and job opportunities. The impact of weak ties on community organisation is less well understood. We contribute to this literature by investigating if weak ties, generated via membership of livelihood programmes, can lead to the creation or enhancement of social capital. Based on data from one of the largest independent primary surveys for India, we find that participation in self-help groups had little impact on livelihoods, but led to the creation of significant social capital, as measured by indicators related to personal efficacy and collective action. We use Entropy Balancing to estimate mean effects to tackle the problem of non-random selection into the programme. In contrast to the bulk of existing evidence on livelihood programmes that is based on small samples, our large sample size and innovative survey design allow us to detect a larger number of effects with greater certainty. We argue that the social capital generated by the programme is a significant positive impact (even though the main target of the programme is to strengthen livelihoods), as it strengthens the process of women's empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We study the takeup of an intervention designed to increase women's economic empowerment. • Lower socio-economic status and household gender norms predict refusal of the intervention. • We employ a randomized-controlled trial to test the impact of a couple's workshop on refusal. • The workshop decreases refusal and mitigates takeup disadvantage related to gender norms. We study the take‐up of an intervention designed to increase women's economic empowerment among sugarcane farmers in Uganda. We find that lower socioeconomic status and household gender norms both predict a couple's refusal of the intervention. We also randomly assign couples to a workshop that aims to increase communication and gender balance in the household and find that couples invited to the workshop were less likely to refuse the subsequently offered empowerment intervention. Moreover, the workshop was effective at addressing sources of disadvantage that arise from household gender norms and division of labor, and less effective at addressing refusal rates associated with socioeconomic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We tested the measurement properties of the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index in two projects/sites. • We used IRT methods to assess item sets used in pro-WEAI indicators for intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency. • One item set capturing intrinsic agency in the right to bodily integrity was measurement equivalent across the two projects. • We recommend refining the other item sets to improve their measurement properties. • We offer steps to test, refine, validate, and shorten pro-WEAI and other women's empowerment scales in development studies. Women's empowerment is a process that includes increases in intrinsic agency (power within); instrumental agency (power to); and collective agency (power with). We used baseline data from two studies—Targeting and Realigning Agriculture for Improved Nutrition (TRAIN) in Bangladesh and Building Resilience in Burkina Faso (BRB)—to assess the measurement properties of survey questions operationalizing selected dimensions of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective agency in the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agricultural Index (pro-WEAI). We applied unidimensional item-response models to question (item) sets to assess their measurement properties, and when possible, their cross-context measurement equivalence—a requirement of measures designed for cross-group comparisons. For intrinsic agency in the right to bodily integrity , measured with five attitudinal questions about intimate partner violence (IPV) against women, model assumptions of unidimensionality and local independence were met. Four items showed good model fit and measurement equivalence across TRAIN and BRB. For item sets designed to capture autonomy in income , intrinsic agency in livelihoods activities , and instrumental agency in: livelihoods activities , the sale or use of outputs, the use of income , and borrowing from financial services , model assumptions were not met, model fit was poor, and items generally were weakly related to the latent (unobserved) agency construct. For intrinsic and instrumental agency in livelihoods activities and for instrumental agency in the sale or use of outputs and in the use of income, items sets had similar precision along the latent-agency continuum, suggesting that similar item sets could be dropped without a loss of precision. IRT models for collective agency were not estimable because of low reported presence and membership in community groups. This analysis demonstrates the use of IRT methods to assess the measurement properties of item sets in pro-WEAI, and empowerment scales generally. Findings suggest that a shorter version of pro-WEAI can be developed that will improve its measurement properties. We recommend revisions to the pro-WEAI questionnaire and call for new measures of women's collective agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]