(not yet a working paper)

Social Protection and Poverty

Long-Term Impacts of a Multifaceted Anti-Poverty Programme in Malawi
(with Tara Bedi and Julia Vaillant)
How durable are the effects of economic inclusion programmes when households face high inflation and repeated shocks? This project returns to 3,300 households across 200 villages in Mangochi and Nsanje more than five years after the intervention. It examines the long-term effects of an economic inclusion package, whether impacts differ when benefits are directed to women or men, and whether adding Umodzi couples’ training changes household welfare, wellbeing and women’s empowerment.

Gender Social Norms and the Mauritania Social Transfer Program
(with Tara Bedi, Claire Boxto, and Julia Vaillant)
To meet its long-term poverty reduction goals, the Government of Mauritania decided to complement its traditional food-based response with targeted interventions to protect the chronically poor and invest in their human capital. Tekavoul (Solidarity in Arabic), a nation-wide social cash transfer program, aims to reach 100,000 extremely poor households by 2020 to protect them from severe deprivation and to support human capital investments. Beneficiaries will receive MRO 15,000 (USD 50) every three months for a period of five years, conditional on participation in social promotion activities addressing hygiene, nutrition, education, civil registration, and child development. Payments will be made to the person in charge of the daily health, nutrition and education of the children in the household, usually the first wife of the male household head or the female household head.  The Trinity Impact Evaluation Unit and the Africa Gender Innovation Lab at the World Bank will conduct a randomized control trial on the effects of adding to Tekavoul a) couples empowerment training and b) community interventions on female empowerment, spousal cohesion and ultimately, welfare outcomes. The objective of this research is to understand the impact of integrating interventions on gender social norms in anti-poverty programs on household welfare and gender empowerment. More specifically, it aims to test whether addressing gender social norms at the household- and community-level help maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of a cash transfer program. The research will collect and analyze data on women’s empowerment, intra-household cooperation, prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV), and welfare outcomes. 

Gender, Climate Change and Social Protection: Experimental Evidence on a Program to Jointy Tackle Constraints
(with Tara Bedi, Thomas Bossuroy, Dalal Hassan and Dilini Hemachandra)
Can a government-led economic inclusion programme create sustainable pathways out of poverty—and which components matter most? This randomized evaluation follows 6,600 households across 352 communities in five districts. It tests a core package of planning, counselling, skills training, productive grants and coaching, alongside additional household-cooperation training and climate-smart agriculture. The study examines livelihoods, food security, resilience, psychosocial wellbeing and financial inclusion.

Gender Focused Multi-Faceted Anti-Poverty Programs: Low-Cost Options for Scale-up
(with Tara Bedi)
How can low-cost graduation programmes strengthen women’s agency as well as household livelihoods? This study follows 3,024 households in 252 villages across rural Uganda. It tests the Village Enterprise programme on its own and with two gender-focused additions: community dialogues led by local champions and training for couples on economic cooperation and household relationships. The study examines women’s empowerment and wellbeing alongside household income, savings and consumption.

When Couples Disagree About Shocks
(with Nouf Abushehab and Tara Bedi)
Household surveys often treat a household as though it has one shared account of events. Using separate interviews with husbands and wives in rural Malawi, this paper asks why spouses may report the same economic and environmental shocks differently. It distinguishes reporting error from differences in perception, recall and information within the household, drawing on a randomized couples’ training and detailed data on shared activities and asset ownership.

Graduation Programs and Climate Shocks in Malawi
(with Tara Bedi and Ilan Noy)
Can economic inclusion programmes help poor households withstand extreme weather? This project uses the randomized rollout of a Graduation programme and the timing of the 2019 floods associated with Cyclone Idai in southern Malawi. Following more than 2,600 households, it examines whether access to the programme strengthens food security and household resilience following a major environmental shock.

Household Covid-19 Messaging in Malawi
(with Tara Bedi and Monica Shandal)
Can household level health messaging close the gap between knowing how to prevent disease and acting on that knowledge? This study evaluates different intensities of short household COVID-19 briefings delivered through a Graduation programme in rural Malawi. It also examines whether adding gender-sensitive messaging through couples’ meetings affects awareness, perceived risk and preventive behaviour.

Women’s Employment and Intimate Partner Violence in Mauritania
(with Tara Bedi, Claire Boxho, Julien Giorgi and Julia Vaillant)
Does paid employment protect women, or can being among the first women to work in a community create new risks? Using data from 2,412 married women across 133 villages in southern Mauritania, this project examines how employment, local norms and the possibility of marital exit interact in shaping different forms of intimate partner violence.

The Contest for Household Resources: Unpaking the Relationship Between Economic Non-Cooperation and Women’s Economic Autonomy
(with Anu Jose, Mousson Estelle Jamel Koussoube, Rachael Pierotti and Julia Vaillant)
Attempts to understand the relationship between women’s empowerment and intimate partner violence (IPV) have been characterised by contradictory theoretical predictions and mixed empirical findings. With a focus on economic autonomy and economic abuse, this paper uses experimental findings from a male-focused gender transformative program in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), interpreted through a non-cooperative household bargaining model, to understand how exogenous changes in male perspectives affect economic abuse women experience for different levels of female economic autonomy. First, at baseline, we find that women who take economic autonomy when their husbands do not acknowledge her autonomy are more likely to experience economic abuse. Second, we find that male-focused gender-transformative programs are successful in households with higher levels of spousal economic contest and abuse. Specifically, the programme reduced economic abuse experienced by the female by an economically significant 6.6 percentage points in households where wife took more economic autonomy at baseline than her husband gave her, compared to households where wife did not contest for economic autonomy. In contrast, the program had no significant effect in reducing economic abuse in households where women did not contest for autonomy. Third, we find no increase in the share of households where women take autonomy, which together with our main result, indicates the presence of a mechanism whereby women trade off economic abuse for greater economic autonomy.

Financial Inclusion, Banking and Consumer Protection

Text Messaging for Financial Behaviour Change in Zambia
(with Justin Archer, Syon Bhanot, Aashish Panta and Siegfried Zottel)
Working with Natsave, Zambia, this project employs a novel text-messaging-based intervention to: 1) identify the behavioral barriers that lead to low engagement with formal financial services amongst those using the services; and 2) test strategies to help people overcome those barriers to increase engagement and financial security. Additionally, the study will provide the first evidence on the impact of conversational, two-way text messaging designed to encourage savings and improve loan repayment behaviors through Q&A capabilities and efforts to enhance trust in formal financial products. The study is working with 84,000 Natsave customers and involves both phone surveys and in-person surveys.

Flexible Loans and Locked Savings for Female Market Vendors in India
(with Billy Jack and Bhavya Shrivastava)
Small business growth is crucial for helping the poor improve their livelihoods, but expensive and inflexible financial products restrict business owners’ access to credit and constrain profits. Innovations for Poverty Action is supporting research that examines whether new financial products can help Indian female market vendors pursue borrowing strategies tailored to their business needs, while building up a reserve of savings they can use to finance week-to-week inventory purchases. The products feature increased flexibility in borrowing and repayment schedules, as well as an offsetting locked savings account that allows clients to build up savings while reducing interest rates on their loans.

A Digital Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Strategies for Reducing Non-Institutional Fraud and Building Trust in a Digital Market Platform
(with Aishwarya Deshpande and Daniel Putman)
Can fraud education and authentication systems build trust in emerging digital markets? This randomized field trial follows 2,905 Nigerian micro-enterprises using a digital marketplace. It compares practical fraud education with a personal communication code for verifying legitimate messages, combining measures of fraud detection and confidence with six months of administrative data on marketplace activity.

Innovative Lending Products for Women-Led SMEs in Nigeria
(with Tricia Koroknay-Palicz, Sreelakshmi Papineni and Siegfried Zottel)
Women entrepreneurs in Nigeria face higher barriers than men do to access finance, especially in providing traditional forms of collateral for loans, since most assets that lenders accept are typically registered to men. This impact evaluation will measure the impact of an innovative credit product designed to surmount longstanding collateral constraints faced by women entrepreneurs by using cash flow to determine credit worthiness. This study will examine how the cashflow loan product affects firm performance and productivity and changes in the owner’s household income, consumption, power relations, decision-making and standard of living. Working with one of the largest retail banks in Nigeria, this project will involve 6,000 SMEs.

Income Uncertainty, Climate Risk and Financial Behaviour in Kenya
(with Tara Bedi)
How does uncertainty, not merely realized shocks, shape household financial choices? This study combines nationally representative FinAccess data for 14,319 Kenyans with long-run rainfall records. Focusing on agriculture-dependent households, it examines whether changing rainfall variability affects choices between regulated and informal products, credit-enabling tools, accessible savings and commitment devices.