Research

In many settings, gender norms constrain women’s agency and discourage them from pursuing fruitful economic opportunities. To study this issue, we run a randomized control trial in 33 solar-powered and 33 unelectrified villages in rural Myanmar. We test a psychological intervention that combines an edutainment component featuring role models with a visualization, goal-setting, and planning workshop. The treatment aims to increase women's empowerment, encourage higher aspirations, and provide participants with a blueprint to pursue them effectively. To test whether the effects of the intervention vary by the level of energy access, we stratified the village-level randomization by region and electrification status. The intervention increased women’s business and financial empowerment, including by raising the share of women who had their own savings, banking, and mobile money account, with larger effects for less empowered women at baseline. Effects on aspirations are concentrated in unelectrified villages, where we find positive impacts on a novel measure of aspirations for productive appliances and on aspirations for children's education. Consistent with the shift in aspirations, we also see a parallel increase in education expenditures, the time women spend on childcare, and the probability that households took out a business loan in these villages. Our findings show that interventions targeting aspirations interact with the local economic environment and are most effective when they provide relevant role models for pathways such as education, which are particularly valuable where other investment opportunities, including productive uses of electricity, are constrained.

The formation of aspirations depends on both social factors and personal circumstances and experiences. Socially determined aspirational reference points create behavioral incentives to improve one's standing but can also have a frustrating effect, motivating the hypothesis of a non-monotonic relationship between aspirations and forward-looking investments. Moreover, marginalized groups, such as women, facing societal constraints to the pursuit of their life ambitions may also engage in aspirations management by reducing aspirations to a level they can satisfy. In this paper, we draw on primary survey data collected in rural Myanmar to study these issues. First, we show positive associations between aspirations, wealth, and several measures of forward-looking expenditures (health, education, and energy). Behind these positive associations, we find evidence of a non-monotonic relationship between aspirations and investment that is consistent with an aspiration failure at the lower and higher ends of the distribution. Second, we provide novel evidence on the complex relationship between women's empowerment and aspirations. Specifically, we show that aspirations are an S-shape function of empowerment, where moderately under-empowered women engage in aspirations management and exhibit lower aspirations than women at the left-most extreme of the empowerment distribution. As empowerment grows, the relationship turns steeply positive. Overall, this provides a new perspective on how empowerment may constraint women's long-run outcomes.

The upcoming decades will be defined by how societies are able to navigate the structural transformations associated with the deployment of automation-related technologies and the energy transition required to effectively fight climate change. Potential increases in unemployment will be a recurrent feature of such economic transformations. Retraining programs are a policy tool that can be used to mitigate negative effects on affected workers. Despite evidence that retraining programs can lead to higher earnings and better employment outcomes for the unemployed, particularly in the medium and long term, the history of retraining programs has been characterized by low uptake rates. This paper reviews the literature on displacement and job training programs and explores two bottlenecks to increasing workers’ uptake of training opportunities: (i) information and job expectations and (ii) locus of control and self-efficacy.

27% of ever-partnered women above 15 years of age worldwide report having experienced physical or sexual violence during their lifetime, with long-term detrimental welfare consequences for victims and families and indirect costs to the health sector, the legal system, and the economy. Reducing Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) requires a comprehensive approach that includes shifting social attitudes, norms, and behaviors. To study this complex issue, we evaluate the flagship program of the Peruvian Ministry of Women (MIMP) to combat IPV in rural areas through an experimental design spanning 250 villages across 9 districts. Specifically, we build on the MIMP's traditional door-to-door approach to test several innovations, including village-level sessions, additional community leader involvement, increased treatment density, and telenovela-style edutainment. Results show that the intervention led to a measurable reduction in IPV (as reported by the female partner) at endline. The sub-experiments embedded within the treatment group show no measurable difference in outcomes based on whether content is delivered in the group or at home. However, we do find that incorporating edutainment into the curriculum and mobilizing a critical mass of households with the initial stage of home visits are critical to making the program work. Importantly, we see treatment effects among those who did not attend the sessions, consistent with broad shifts in social norms exerting an influence on behavior.

This study aims to assess the impacts of a cold chain intervention by Keep IT Cool (KIC), a local company offering cold chain services to fisherfolk in Kenya, that connect suppliers at beach landing sites to urban consumers. It uses data collected through a panel survey of fisherfolks operating in five Beach Management Units (BMUs) - which are a type of fishing cooperative - around Lake Turkana. Baseline data were collected in 2023, as KIC was first establishing operations in the area, and endline (2024), at which point KIC had established relationships with a subset of the surveyed BMUs. It combines both panel and cross-sectional observations and employs a difference-in-differences strategy for the identification of the intervention's causal impacts on fishing outcomes, income, resilience, and food security.

This paper uses data from a baseline survey of a randomized controlled trial, several experimental games played between spouses, and a Vickrey auction to explore women's bargaining power in rural Myanmar and its relation to survey measures to woman empowerment, energy-related investments and consumption, and willingness to pay for a selected appliance. To do so, we construct two alternative indices of woman empowerment - using Anderson (2008)'s approach on a selected set of agency sub-indices and Principal Component Analysis on an extension of this set. Finally, we also conduct an exercise where we re-create the PCA approach on solar mini-grid villages and unelectrified villages to explore whether the structure of empowerment itself differs according to the level of energy access.

This study uses a difference-in-differences design on a matched sample to evaluate the impacts of solar-powered irrigation provided by SunCulture (a Kenyan social enterprise providing small-scale farmers with solar-powered irrigation solutions through an affordable "pay-as-you-go" credit model). We study how access to solar-powered irrigation influences various aspects of smallholder farmers' daily livelihoods, including financial and economic outcomes, food security, farm productivity, social capital, household wealth, and overall resilience. An important component of our evaluation focuses on assessing the resilience of participating households, particularly their capacity to recover from economic and environmental shocks. This includes measuring how households perceive and respond to risk, and how these perceptions relate to their broader adaptive strategies.

This study explores willingness to pay (WTP) for resilience in farming communities in Kenya and Ethiopia and fishing communities in Kenya. To do so, we conduct a survey experiment designed to derive the demand curve for a hypothetical resilience-enhancing intervention. The experiment followed a randomization procedure that assigned respondents to combinations of recovery improvements (30% or 80% better recovery) and four different monthly prices for the investments that would have to be paid by households in communities adopting those interventions, over a 5 year period. Participants consistently show a higher average WTP for the more effective intervention, suggesting that individuals understood the implications of the different degrees of resilience induced by the hypothetical interventions and valued the projects accordingly.

Pastoralism is an important economic activity in Mongolia. Steppe rangelands have been decreasing in productivity, in part due to increases in livestock heads, and due to an increase in the frequency and severity of both drier summers and harsher winters (dzuds). Consequently, fodder availability, especially during the winters, is increasingly becoming a challenge. Livestock heads that survive the winters are particularly emaciated, thus increasing grazing pressure on grasslands during the summer months and consequently reducing grassland productivity and its regeneration capacity. Mongolia's capacity to improve the productivity of its grasslands and increase forest area relies on meeting fodder requirements through alternative methods. This study will use the Household Socioeconomic Survey 2023, which is a nationally representative survey of households in Mongolia, to understand the scope for meeting fodder requirements by supporting agropastoralism. 

Electricity access is key for growth and poverty alleviation. Despite being a longstanding priority on the development agenda, about 1 in 10 people worldwide, most of which in the rural Global South, still lack access. Off-grid mini-grids are a potentially scalable strategy to expand electricity access in remote areas. However, financial sustainability for developers is a serious challenge to scaling mini-grid solutions and realizing their development potential. Ex ante demand estimates are often inaccurate, and over-optimistic, and lead to mini-grid sizing that is inconsistent with local needs, weakening their economic performance. The same low demand that raises mini-grids’ appeal when compared to the economics of grid expansion is also an obstacle to their sustainability. Sites are characterized by low incomes and electricity demand, leading to low revenues that make it difficult to cover operational costs. The study aims to evaluate COMET - a customer engagement workshop and simulation platform for optimizing mini-grid design via better demand estimates, increasing demand, and improving financial sustainability at the project and sectoral level. The study would be located in Uganda and is the result of a partnership that includes COMET, the solar developer Equatorial Power, and Environment for Development - Uganda (EfD-Uganda).

In this study we will evaluate an enhanced marketing intervention to promote the uptake of solar irrigation technologies in rural Kenya. Specifically the study will target farming household that do not currently have access to the technology through a traditional door-to-door marketing approach (control condition) and a marketing "plus" approach (treatment condition). The treatment will will include the following additional elements: (i) use of an edutainment style component combining farmer testimonials with a digestible summary of the results of a prior evaluation, and (ii) the invitation to attend "rainmaker" parties with local model farmers.

In this study we will (i) explore deviations from the standard timeframes employed by the DHS to measure IPV by asking survey items for different timeframes and experimentally varying the order in which we ask each set and (ii) test two novel methods for the measurement of IPV that address the privacy and broader psychological limitations of DHS questionnaires with the goal of generating actionable insights for improving the measurement of IPV.