Image of Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Africa

Race, Culture, and Identity

Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Africa

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Women in developing countries are disempowered: high youth unemployment, early marriage and childbearing interact to limit their investments into human capital and enforce dependence on men. We evaluate a multi-faceted policy intervention attempting to jumpstart adolescent women’s empowerment in Uganda, a context in which 60% of the population are aged below twenty. The intervention aims to relax human capital constraints that adolescent girls face by simultaneously providing them vocational training and information on sex, reproduction and marriage. We …nd that four years post-intervention, adolescent girls in treated communities are 48% more likely to engage in income generating activities, an impact almost entirely driven by their greater engagement in self-employment. Teen pregnancy falls by 34%, and early entry into marriage/cohabitation falls by 62%. Strikingly, the share of girls reporting sex against their will drops by close to a third and aspired ages at which to marry and start childbearing move forward. The results highlight the potential of a multi-faceted program that provides skills transfers as a viable and cost-e¤ective policy intervention to improve the economic and social empowerment of adolescent girls over a four year horizon.

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English
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Uganda
Action
Women’s Empowerment
Randomized
Control Trial
Developing countries
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Article
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