Building Resilience through Inclusive Safety Nets: Empowering Marginalized Women

Many social safety net programs are designed to be female-friendly, yet implementation remains blind to intra-household power structures. Inclusion Economics researchers developed a gender-intentional design innovation in India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the world’s largest workfare program. Despite India’s impressive progress in financial inclusion and its central mandate to empower women through MGNREGS, implementation has traditionally reflected household power structures, meaning  payments for women’s work were made to her household head, generally the husband, rather than the woman herself. As part of the USAID Agency Learning and Evidence Month 2024, Charity Troyer Moore, Scientific Director at Inclusion Economics, presented findings on the effects of design changes that can make the program work better for women – with implications for similar policies around the world.

Could redirecting women’s MGNREGS wages into her own bank account and helping women understand how to use the account affect women’s economic activity, empowerment, and well-being? To answer this question, the researchers worked in Madhya Pradesh, India, to conduct a randomized controlled trial across 200 communities comparing the effects of:

1. Helping women open their own no-frills bank accounts; 

2. Ensuring women’s new bank accounts were linked to MGNREGS, so wages would be paid directly into the new account; and 

3. Delivering basic training about the purpose of bank accounts and how to access workfare wages in accounts. 

As described in Field et al. (2021), after three years, women targeted for direct deposit and training worked more in public and private sector jobs and held more liberal views on work-related gender norms. The team surveyed women again 8 years after the intervention and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and find evidence that some positive effects on gender norms, empowerment and labor market participation persist – especially for women who were most norms-constrained at the onset. This work points to several important design and implementation features of safety net programs that are crucial to empowering the traditionally disadvantaged, and researchers are currently investigating mechanisms to effectively scale the intervention while maximizing cost-effectiveness.

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