Improving household resilience to floods is an important policy challenge. In this paper, I study whether access to credit could achieve that goal. In particular, I examine the relationship between growth and resilience, the two primary motivators for increased access to credit. I do so by analyzing Pakistan’s largest women-led development program (SUCCESS), which mobilized and provided loans to landless and ultra-poor households based on a poverty score cutoff. I exploit the discontinuity in loan eligibility, resulting in otherwise similar households being ineligible for the loans. Among eligible households, the program increased loan takeup from 1% to 46%. The increased access to credit led to a 22 percentage point increase in investment in a riskier asset (livestock). However, this came at the cost of reduced housing quality, leading to higher house damages during floods. After the 2022 floods, in the high-flooded villages, the floods wiped out all the increase in livestock, reduced mental health, and increased loan defaults. In the low-flooded villages, households continued to accumulate more assets, and the gap widened over time.

We study the impact of a community-driven development (CDD) program targeting only women on social, political, and economic empowerment. Our intervention combines social mobilization and support packages for poor households. We randomized the treatment across 23 clusters of settlements and sampled 2290 households from 150 settlements. We find indication that the intervention might have increased information about local government for the whole sample and strong evidence for strengthened perceptions about political participation, as well as access to public goods for women who assume a leadership role. We can only identify such heterogeneous effects on self-selected female leaders because our control group also received treatment and selected leaders after the midline. We find no significant effects on intrahousehold decision-making, household’s economic well-being, and social cohesion

This paper uses a survey of 15,000 households and 260 tutors to fully characterize 21 distinct education markets in Pakistan. Roughly 30% of students receive daily private tutoring, making it a major potential vehicle for scaling educational best practices. Moreover, most paid employment for women with secondary degrees in these markets was private tutoring—cultural constraints limit women’s work opportunities, and tutoring is one of the highest-paid activities women can perform from home. This has led to tutor markets where many suppliers offer group-based tutoring in their homes after school. However, follow-up surveys and pilot work show that, while the market may be pervasive, it is not always visible - parents are often unaware of alternative tutor options for their child. We are currently studying how addressing this information failure affects both the supply and demand sides of the tutor market..