Enhancing women’s participation in agricultural production, including livestock production, has the potential to generate a range of benefits for rural households in the developing world. These benefits include enhanced economic welfare, investment in children’s health and nutrition, and empowerment for women. However, attitudes and norms may shape the ability of women to engage in a broader range of productive activities if those activities are not viewed as traditionally female domains. The attitudes of women themselves and their husbands may be particularly salient: if women do not view livestock production as an appropriate activity to pursue based on their perception of community norms, they may not be responsive to economic incentives designed to encourage their involvement. Similarly, if husbands do not view ownership and control over assets or the sale of agriculture as appropriate roles for their wives, it may be very challenging for women to maintain or increase their role in household agricultural production.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, entailing widespread school closures as well as acute disruptions to household livelihoods, has presumably had substantial consequences for adolescent well-being in developing country contexts that remain largely unexplored. We present novel evidence about the prevalence of mental health challenges among adolescent students as well as educators in rural Mozambique using data from an in-person survey conducted in 175 schools. In our sample, 31% of students report low levels of well-being (though only 10% suffer from high anxiety): students enrolled in schools that used a wider variety of distance learning measures report lower anxiety, while students reporting familial shocks linked to the pandemic report higher anxiety and lower well-being. Educators experience comparatively lower levels of anxiety and higher well-being, and household-level shocks are most predictive of variation in mental health. However, well-being is negatively affected by the range of hygiene-related measures implemented in schools upon reopening.

We study the role of a multifaceted ultra-poor graduation program in protecting household wellbeing and women’s welfare from the effects of localized droughts in Ethiopia. We use data from a large experimental trial of an integrated livelihood and nutrition intervention that supplemented the consumption support provided by Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), conducted within a sample in which all households were beneficiaries of the PSNP. We match three rounds of household survey data to detailed satellite weather data to identify community-level exposure to droughts. We then exploit random assignment to the graduation program to evaluate whether exposed households show heterogeneous effects of drought on household food security and livestock holdings, women’s diets and nutritional status, and prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV). We find that droughts have substantial negative effects on these outcomes, but the intervention serves to consistently moderate these effects, and for some outcomes (particularly diets and nutrition and IPV), the intervention fully protects households from any adverse drought affects. A further analysis exploits variation across treatment arms that received different program elements and suggests that the primary mechanism is enhanced household savings.

While a growing literature analyzes the economic effects of cash for work programs in developing countries, there remains little evidence about the longer-term effects of these interventions. This paper presents findings from a randomized controlled trial evaluating a three month intervention providing public works employment in rural Tunisia. The evaluation design incorporates two dimensions of randomization — community-level randomization to treatment and control, and individual-level randomization among eligible individuals — and a sample of 2,718 individuals was tracked over five years. The findings suggest that cash for work leads to significant increases in labor market engagement, assets, consumption, financial inclusion, civic engagement, psychological well being, and women’s empowerment one-year post-treatment; however, these effects have largely attenuated to zero five years post-treatment, with the exception of a positive effect on assets. There is also evidence of positive spillover effects within treatment communities, but these effects similarly attenuate over time

A growing literature in economics has analyzed the effects of psychological interventions designed to boost individual aspirations as a strategy to increase investments with long-term returns and thus reduce poverty. This paper reports on a randomized controlled trial evaluating a short video-based intervention designed to increase aspirations of adults in poor rural Ethiopian households, all of whom are beneficiaries of the Productive Safety Net Program, the main government safety net program in Ethiopia. Evidence from a sample of 5258 adults from 3220 households is consistent with the hypothesis that there is no evidence that the aspirations treatment had any significant effects on self-reported aspirations for the household, educational investment in children, or savings nine months post-treatment, suggesting that the effect of light-touch aspirations treatments for extremely poor adults may be limited in this context.

In complex nutrition-sensitive interventions, separately identifying the effect of each programmatic component on the outcomes of interest can be challenging. This paper examines the relationship between participation in different elements of the nutrition-sensitive intervention SELEVER, implemented in rural Burkina Faso with the objective of increasing poultry production and enhancing related nutritional outcomes, and women’s poultry production. We use structural equation modeling to estimate the direct effect of each component of program participation. Our findings suggest that respondents’ directly reported participation in SELEVER intervention activities mediates less than half of the observed intervention effects on poultry owned by women as well as women’s revenue and profits from poultry production. Accordingly, other indirect channels for program effects also seem to be important.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major worldwide health challenge, and addressing this challenge requires high-quality data. This analysis uses a large-scale survey of 5,033 households in rural Ethiopia in which both men and women were surveyed about past-year IPV in order to quantify the degree of discordance, including both husband only reporting and wife only reporting, for multiple forms of IPV (emotional, physical and sexual). In addition, logistic regression is employed to analyze the effects of demographic characteristics and individual norms and behaviors on the probability of discordant reporting. The results suggest that almost half of households (44%) are characterized by discordant reporting in at least one dimension of IPV. Given the high level of discordance, 61.4% of households report any physical and/or sexual IPV using the household-level measure, compared to a rate of 41.9% from the women’s data only. In addition, men who report more gender-equitable attitudes and behaviors (failing to concur with justifications for IPV, reporting higher support for gender equitable norms, and reporting a higher level of female engagement in decision-making and intrahousehold task-sharing) are more likely to be members of wife only reporting households: i.e., they are less likely to report perpetration of IPV. Women who report more gender-equitable attitudes and behaviors, by contrast, are more likely to be members of husband only reporting households.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a global public health crisis and human rights violation, with adverse consequences for women and girls, economies as a whole, and future generations. Existing multicountry evidence suggests that the high prevalence of VAWG in low- and middle-income countries could be holding back advances in many priority areas — such as education (Gennari et al. 2014), health (Ellsberg et al. 2008), nutrition (Yount et al. 2011), adaptation to climate change (Le Masson et al. 2019), and adoption of sustainable livelihoods (Morrison and Orlando 2004). In the context of agricultural development, VAWG can reduce agency (Theis et al. 2018) — preventing women from seeking control over assets and income (instrumental agency), participating in groups (collective agency), and building self-worth (intrinsic agency). In addition, fear of sexual harassment and/or sexual violence in public spaces can induce girls or women to choose lower quality educational outcomes (Borker 2021), limit their opportunities for safe and decent work (Nordehn 2018), and depress their labor market participation (Chakraborty et al. 2018, Siddique 2021).

While indirect methods are increasingly widely used to measure sensitive behaviors such as intimate partner violence in order to minimize social desirability biases in responses, in developing countries the use of more complex indirect questioning methods raises important questions around how individuals will react to the use of a more unusual and complex question structure. This paper presents evidence from a list experiment measuring multiple forms of intimate partner violence within an extremely poor sample of women in rural Ethiopia. We find that the list experiment does not generate estimates of intimate partner violence that are higher than direct response questions; rather, prevalence estimates using the list experiment are lower vis-à-vis prevalence estimates using the direct reports, and sometimes even negative. We interpret this finding as consistent with “fleeing” behavior by respondents who do not wish to be associated with statements associated with intimate partner violence.

We explore the impact of different models of scalable nutrition services embedded within a light-touch graduation program, implemented at scale in Ethiopia. The graduation program provided poor households enrolled in Ethiopia’s national safety net, the Protective Safety Net Program (PSNP), with additional livelihood programming including savings groups, business skills training and linkages to financial services. In addition, extremely poor households received a one-time livelihood grant on an experimental basis, as cash transfers or in-kind poultry grants, at a value much smaller than lump sum transfers in other graduation model programs in recent literature. The experiment compared a core nutrition model of nutrition information and sanitation and hygiene activities to an enhanced model that added more intensive nutrition messaging, supplementary feeding of malnourished children, mental health services, and a male engagement activity. Results show that interaction with health care workers and participation in community health activities increased significantly under the enhanced nutrition model, as did maternal nutritional knowledge. Nevertheless, neither nutrition model led to significant improvements in child dietary diversity or anthropometric outcomes on average. However, cash livelihood grants combined with the enhanced nutrition model reduced childhood stunting.