Research

The paper investigates the effectiveness of different-sized business grants relative unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) in Somalia. It finds that providing a lump sum business grant increases the likelihood of business ownership and income more than UCT in the short term. However, these impacts are greater and longer-lasting for recipients of larger grants, with the medium-sized grant being identified as the most cost-effective option.

The study tests if BRAC's ultra-poor graduation model, successful in various contexts, works for people with disabilities. We randomize eligible households in a geographical cluster to either a treatment or a control condition. Participants in treatment condition receive unconditional cash transfers for 6 months, training, access to savings-and-loans groups, and a productive asset transfer. Programme activities are adapted to address specific barriers that people with disabilities face. We examine livelihoods and well-being of people with disabilities upon programme completion and one and half years later.

This paper identifies two broad categories of mechanisms through which Digital Financial Services (DFS) can increase women’s economic empowerment (WEE). First, DFS can increase WEE by improving women’s outside options and thus her bargaining power. Second, DFS can increase a woman’s ability to enact her preferences in other ways (without changing her outside options). The paper proposes some questions relevant to all these mechanisms: a) the role of contextual factors, more specifically digital literacy, b) complementarity in DFS mechanisms, and c) the importance of measuring downstream outcomes of WEE.

Implementing girl-friendly changes to school facilities, such as improved menstrual hygiene management and increased privacy, can potentially reduce absenteeism and improve learning outcomes. We investigate the effects of Girl-Friendly Spaces (GFS), which offer exclusive amenities for girls including toilets, bathrooms, dining rooms, living areas, reading materials, and prayer facilities. Our findings indicate that GFS may reduce girls' absenteeism up to 15 percentage points. Our findings are robust to series of placebo outcomes.

Persons with disabilities (PWDs) are disproportionately excluded from livelihood opportunities. This exclusion traps PWDs and their households in perpetual poverty. I study whether a program that simultaneously strengthen productive, financial, human and social assets of the ultra-poor alleviates this exclusion. The program features adaptations of a previously successful multifaceted program to make it disability inclusive. Using a cluster-randomized study in Northern Uganda, I find the program induces a switch from less desirous occupations (casual labour) to more productive occupations (farm or non-farm business), especially among PWDs. While the program reduced social isolation of persons without disabilities, participation of PWDs in social activities remained unchanged. I argue that personal empowerment effects of the program in absence of sufficient appreciation of barriers erected by the society on the lives of PWDs reinforces the existing prejudicial views against PWDs.

Individuals’ socio-emotional skills (SES), and their perceptions of their skill levels, matter for labor market outcomes and other welfare outcomes. Men appear to have higher levels of SES than women, but this gender gap is typically documented in self-reported measures. Few studies use measures beyond self-reports—or seek to measure SES granularly and rigorously in large samples, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This paper deploys novel sets of self-reported and behavioral measures of 14 SES in a sample of more than 4,000 male and female youth not in full-time education, employment or training, in urban and peri-urban Tanzania. The findings show that men score higher than women on all 12 positively-worded self-reported measures. In contrast, gender gaps in behavioral measures are only observed for a few skills, and are far smaller in magnitude. The paper provides suggestive evidence that this pattern reflects men’s overestimation of their own skills, rather than women’s underestimation. In particular, there is a larger gap between self-reported and behavioral measures among men. Men’s self-reports, and the gap between their self-reported and behavioral measures, are strongly correlated with measures of their social desirability and gendered beliefs about abilities—but this does not hold for women.

We evaluate the impact of a role model intervention on the gender attitudes, college aspirations and education outcomes of youths in Somalia. In 2018, we randomly selected elementary schools to receive a visit from a college student. Within each treatment school, we selected four grades, two to receive a visit from a female college student and two from a male college student. The ``role models'' gave unscripted talks about their study journeys, including challenges and strategies to overcome setbacks. Six months after the intervention, we found a significant and large impact of (only) female role models on boys' and girls' attitudes toward gender equality but no impact on college aspirations. Data collected two and four years later from the cohorts graduating from primary school produce smaller and non-significant treatment effects on the survey outcomes but positive impacts on enrollment in high school and a lower probability of early marriage, as reported by teachers.

Women empowerment is one of the goals of deepening financial inclusion through digital financial services. It is argued that expanding mobile money usage empowers women by enhancing their financial control. Using micro data from Kenya, we find that mobile money usage increases personal financial control for both men and women, with women gaining more. However, this does not always extend to broader household decisions. Privacy appears to be a key factor in enhancing women's financial control.

Recent evidence highlights the importance of socioemotional skills (SES) for labour market success. Through a large-scale randomized trial among Tanzanian youth not in education or employment, we examine the impact of SES training on awareness and management skills. Although soft skills training boosts youth's skills, effects diminish over time. Preliminary exploratory analysis suggests short-term SES gains lead to improved labour market outcomes over time for only a sub-group – men who were seeking for a job at baseline.

Women farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa often realize lower agricultural productivity and adopt fewer new technologies compared to men farmers. We explore whether the lack of soft skills (intrapersonal and interpersonal) inhibits adoption of agricultural technologies. By cross-randomizing soft skills training and composting technology information, we examine whether the gender gap in technology adoption narrows among trained women.