Female community-driven development and empowerment: An RCT in Pakistan

Abstract

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

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