Working Papers, Policy Briefs     and others

WORKING PAPERS

This study uses a cluster-randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of a large-scale women and girls empowerment program on sexual and reproductive health and empowerment outcomes in Côte d’Ivoire. The study assesses and compares the impact of diverse strategies aimed at equipping girls with life skills and sexual and reproductive health knowledge, provided through well-established safe spaces, in isolation or in combination with livelihood support interventions, or with initiatives designed to engage boys and men and community and religious leaders. The findings show that one year after the end of the interventions, safe spaces alone have a moderate impact on girls’ empowerment, while safe spaces combined with husbands’ and future husbands’ clubs are the most impactful. Combining safe spaces with livelihood support interventions leads to improvements in adolescent girls’ employment outcomes, as expected. Finally, the findings show that engaging leaders in the context of safe spaces interventions yields mixed results on girls’ empowerment. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic led to a historic and widespread shutdown of schools across the world, including in Sub-Saharan Africa, there were general concerns that girls would be disproportionately affected. This study analyzes the effects of the pandemic on the school attendance of adolescent girls and boys in six African countries. The study uses individual-level data on children’s school attendance collected as part of high-frequency phone surveys. Contrary to expectations, the study reveals that there is no evidence to suggest that gender gaps widened during the pandemic. If anything, gender gaps appear to have narrowed in some countries. Further in-depth analysis shows that while being a descendent of the household head, having parents with at least primary education, and above-median household wealth were associated with a higher probability of school attendance among adolescents before the pandemic, these factors lost their salience in explaining school attendance in the aftermath of the pandemic. These results suggest that some traditionally protective forces were eroded during the COVID-19 crisis. 


Mechanization has the potential to boost agricultural production and reduce poverty in rural economies, but its impacts remain poorly understood. This paper randomizes the subsidized provision of a pair of traction oxen among 2,546 farmers in Côte d’Ivoire through a matching grant. The analysis finds positive impacts on households’ agricultural production during the agricultural season overlapping with oxen delivery, and additional increases in total land holdings and use of complementary inputs in the subsequent season. The intervention affected household members in different ways, with wives and daughters substantially reducing their work on the farm—especially in districts with more stringent gender norms around handling oxen. In these districts, introducing traction oxen resulted in women shifting to off-farm work. The intervention also improved girls’ health and reduced school dropout among boys. The results provide novel evidence on the human development effects of mechanization, while highlighting how social prescriptions mediate the impacts of technology within the household. 

Policy brief available here, Voxdev here

Low levels of agricultural productivity and investment hinder economic growth in developing countries. This paper presents results from a field experiment in Côte d'Ivoire, which randomized wives’ participation in an agricultural extension training for rubber, a male-dominated export crop that takes six years to start producing latex but requires upfront care. The training included a planning portion, consisting of filling out an action plan for rubber farming over the next two years, and a skills portion. In the without-wife group, households witnessed a 26.4 percent drop in the value of the crop harvested and a 18.4 percent drop in productivity, with labor going to planting rubber seedlings. In the group with wife participation, households had higher levels of investment (planting 20 percent more rubber seedlings) and were able to maintain pre-program levels of agricultural production on older trees and other crops. These households increased their labor hours and agricultural input use, resulting in no drop in overall production or productivity. This outcome did not come through increased skills or incentives. Rather, underlying these results are increases in planned agricultural management by wives, increased retention of the action plan, and a reduction in gendered task division. The results show how including women in economic planning can improve the efficiency of household farm production and promote higher levels of investment. 


Policy brief available here

Using data from 41,873 individuals across 17 African countries and 13 studies, this paper maps data from various self-reported scales to 10 socio-emotional skills and examine gender differences in these skills and their relationship with education and earnings. Apart from self-control, the findings show a significant male advantage in self-reported skills—men have an aggregate socio-emotional skill level 0.151 standard deviations higher than women, equivalent to the socio-emotional skill gained over 5.6 years of education. This is robust to controlling for positive self-concept. Closing the gender gap in education would close 17percent of this gap. While overall socio-emotional skill and education are positively correlated for both men and women, women do not have a positive correlation with education for some individual socio-emotional skills. The male advantage in socio-emotional skills increases at higher education levels. Socio-emotional skills are associated with higher earnings, especially for women. However, the specific skills associated with higher earnings differ by gender. Interpersonal skills are more strongly correlated with earnings for women than for men, and measures of these skills are often underrepresented, which indicates a key direction for future research. The paper further examines differences in the relationship between socio-emotional skills and earnings by levels of education and occupation. It discusses the implications of these results for interventions seeking to hone women’s socio-emotional skills for labor market success and to address the gender norms that may perpetuate gaps in socio-emotional skills. 

POLICY BRIEFS AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS

MEDIA