Conference Agenda

Traditional societies impose many constraints on women's agency both within and outside the household. Consistent with such constraints, women in low- and middle-income countries experience persistently high levels of poverty and poor physical and mental well-being, all of which are consistent with low intrahousehold bargaining power. This session will examine the evidence from Chad, Tanzania, and Uganda on three popular interventions-- entrepreneurial training, cash transfers, and a goal setting exercise-- to improve women's agency. Further, while women's economic empowerment is often considered the end goal of interventions to improve women's agency, the papers in this session consider a wider range of outcomes, from mental health and subjective well-being to intimate partner violence, and even marital separations. By considering a wider range of outcomes, these papers will highlight the far-reaching nature of women's empowerment interventions and consider whether many of these impacts may outlast the short-term economic impacts that end with the intervention.

Women's economic autonomy can protect against intimate partner violence (IPV), but the process of increasing economic autonomy may generate adverse effects. We provide experimental evidence on the impacts of an important pathway to economic autonomy for women: self-employment. We randomize women in Uganda to a control group or two versions of an entrepreneurship program. Both follow the same curriculum but differ in how they deliver mentoring. In Intensive Mentoring, mentors seek out women at their home or business. Women in Opt-In Mentoring can visit mentors at the training venue. Women in Intensive Mentoring experience large reductions in IPV relative to control and Opt-In Mentoring. However, women have a strong revealed preference for Opt-In Mentoring. Intensive Mentoring appears to increase spousal knowledge of women's businesses, allowing women to negotiate for better household outcomes but limiting household decision-making power and control over their business. Our results underline the trade-offs women make when building economic autonomy.

Adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence across the globe. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized

controlled trial that offers females a goal setting activity to improve their sexual

and reproductive health outcomes and offers their male partners a soccer intervention, which educates and inspires young men to make better sexual and reproductive health choices. Both interventions reduce female reports of intimate partner violence. Impacts are larger among females who were already sexually active at baseline. We develop a model to understand the mechanisms at play. The soccer intervention improves male attitudes around violence and sexual behaviors. Females in the goal setting arm take more control of their sexual and reproductive health by exiting violent relationships. Both of these mechanisms drive reductions in IPV.

Cash transfers often increase household consumption and improve children's outcomes. Can they also influence gender roles in household production and thus possibly even familial structure? This paper reports on such impacts of a cash transfer program in Chad. Results based on an arbitrary, undisclosed threshold for the disbursement of these transfers in a regression discontinuity design show that there are significant increases in women's business profits after 4 quarterly payments totaling USD 304. The cash not only increased income from non-farm enterprises but also resulted in large take-up with women using transfers to start new businesses and hire paid labor. These new businesses are typically related to food processing. The cash transfer results in women becoming responsible for selling the harvest rather than men, potentially shifting gender roles within the household. Further, while some households thus used the transfers to reorganize their productive activities for economic gain, in other households, we find suggestive evidence of increased marital separations. At the same time, the program led to meaningful improvements in a broad set of women's subjective well-being, including self-efficacy, likelihood of depression, and perceived social status. These short run impacts of cash transfers suggest that such programs can lead to potentially longer-lasting changes in gender roles and household composition in patriarchal, ultra-poor settings.