WUNRN
Afghanistan -
Empowering Women through Development Aid
Andrew Beath! Fotini, Christia, Ruben
Enikolopov -
January 17, 2013
In societies with widespread gender discrimination, development programs with gender quotas are considered a way to improve women’s economic, political, and social status.Using a randomized field experiment across 500 Afghan villages, we examine the effects of a development program that mandates women’s community participation. We find that even in a highly conservative context like Afghanistan, such initiatives improve female participation in some economic, social, and political activities, including increased mobility and income generation. They, however, produce no change in more entrenched female roles linked to family decision-making or in attitudes towards the general role of women in society.
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A woman in rural
Photo -
Photo: Fotini Christia
By placing some women in local leadership positions, an innovative development aid program integrates women into civic life, and may have economic benefits.
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office - August 1, 2013
In recent decades,
The experiment, conducted over four years, assessed the impact of a
community-driven program run by the Afghan government. The program required
participating villages to have gender equality in their jirga or shura,
local councils that typically oversee public goods and disputes, and mandated
that women also vote in elections for these offices.
The evaluation, conducted by the academic researchers, looked at the effects of
this program; it found that women in participating villages were 15 percent
more likely to have worked in income-generating activities, for instance,
compared to women in nonparticipating villages. Women in participating villages
were also 50 percent more likely to report having someone with whom they can
discuss problems in their villages. Social attitudes shifted in these
localities, too: Men were 39 percent less likely to think that women should
play no role in village decision-making.
“
“It was therefore quite remarkable to find that a community-driven development
program, mandating the creation of elected, gender-balanced councils, leads to
an increase in women’s involvement in the community overall, as well as in
income generation, mobility and broader socialization,” Christia adds.
The paper, “Empowering Women through Development Aid,” is being published in
the August issue of the American Political Science Review. Along with
Christia, the paper’s co-authors are Andrew Beath, an economist at the World
Bank, and Ruben Enikolopov, an assistant professor at the
Toward equality in
voting
The researchers evaluated the Afghan government’s National Solidarity Programme
(NSP), which aims to foster rural development, more representative government,
and better services and infrastructure. The program is funded by the World Bank
and other sponsors, and is run by the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation
and Development.
Various NSP projects have been developed in more than 30,000 villages. Some 500
villages that were part of the researchers’ evaluation were spread throughout
10 administrative districts, intended to represent Afghanistan’s ethnic
diversity: Five are predominantly Tajik districts, four are largely Pashtun,
one is predominantly Hazara, and two have significant Uzbek and Turkmen
populations.
The program started in 2003; the results described in the paper come from a
study of the project’s second phase, carried out from 2007 through 2011. To
generate their results, Christia and her colleagues collected survey data
gathered from more than 13,000 male and female respondents from the villages in
question, which measured both tangible changes in political practices and
attitudes about gender.
Even when local councils exist, they do not necessarily meet regularly.
However, the survey showed that villages participating in the project were 4
percentage points more likely to meet, and 8 percentage points more likely to
discuss issues with women from other villages.
Among other changes in attitude, men in the participating villages were 19
percent more likely to think that women should be allowed to vote in elections
for the village headman, compared to men in nonparticipating villages, and
women in participating villages were 8 percent more likely to think so.
All told, the project “speaks to the broader role of the effects of development
aid on women’s issues, particularly in other places that have rigid social and traditional
structures,” Christia says. “If community-driven development can have a
positive effect on women’s lives in rural Afghanistan, it could be something to
consider in several other places that are challenging for women.”
At least one thing did not change in the participating villages: Important
household decisions remained very much the domain of men, and attitudes about
such family roles did not budge.
“We find no such effects on women’s role in the family core, but those would be
harder to change and would require a lot more time,” Christia says.
But are these changes
durable?
Other scholars say the study both contains valuable findings, and suggests the
need for further research on the effects of such development interventions.
“This line of research is extremely fruitful,” says Donald P. Green, a
political scientist at Columbia University, who has read the study and calls it
an “unusually ambitious field experiment in a part of the world everyone’s
interested in.” Still, as Green notes, it remains an open question whether
these types of development aid projects can transform government practices over
extended periods of time: “One of the next steps is to look at institutions,”
he says, with an eye to seeing how those governing norms may or may not
change.
Certainly any civic gains would seem to be significant in a country where only
11 percent of nonelite female villagers attend religious school, 3 percent
attend secular school, and the average number of years of education, for women
who have attended school at all, is only three years.
But as Christia acknowledges, it is an open question whether the gains women
realized in the Afghan experiment are long-lasting or will evaporate once the
funding for the programs ceases.
“It would be great to see how lasting these effects are, that is, to see if
interventions that last for longer have stronger or more durable effects,”
Christia says. “The general question is therefore one of sustainability.”
The study was supported by, among other groups, the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the NSP.