Building Resilience through Inclusive Safety Nets: Empowering Marginalized Women
This event is part of Agency Learning and Evidence Month from May 2–30, USAID’s flagship celebration of research, evaluation, and learning.
Many safety net programs are designed to be female-friendly, yet implementation remains blind to intrahousehold power structures. We study a female-friendly design innovation in India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the world’s largest workfare program, which aims to support women’s well-being. Despite India’s impressive progress in financial inclusion and its central mandate to empower women through MGNREGS, implementation has traditionally reflected household power structures, meaning payments for women’s work were made to her household head, typically the husband, rather than the woman herself.
Could redirecting women’s MGNREGS wages into her own bank account and helping women understand how to use the account affect women’s economic activity, empowerment, and well-being? To answer this question, relevant to USAID Learning Questions on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (as well as Resilience and Climate), we worked in Madhya Pradesh, India, to conduct a randomized control across 200 communities comparing the effects of:
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Helping women open their own no-frills bank accounts;
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Ensuring women’s new bank accounts were linked to MGNREGS, so wages would be paid directly into the new account; and
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Delivering basic training about the purpose of bank accounts and how to access workfare wages in accounts.
As described in Field et al. (2021), after three years, women targeted for direct deposit and training worked more in public and private sector jobs and held more liberal views on work-related gender norms. We surveyed women again 8 years after the intervention and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and find evidence that some positive effects on gender norms, empowerment and labor market participation persist - especially for women who were most norms-constrained at the onset. Our work points to several important design and implementation features of safety net programs that are crucial to empowering the traditionally disadvantaged.
This event is part of Agency Learning and Evidence Month from May 2–30, USAID’s flagship celebration of research, evaluation, and learning. See the 2024 Event Program for more information.