Social Protection and Poverty

Female Empowerment, Well Being and Marriage Quality: A Mixed-Method Evaluation of A Gender Focused Multifaceted Anti-Poverty Programme in Malawi
(with Tara Bedi, James Copestake and Julia Vaillant)
While the economic impact of multifaceted anti-poverty programmes has been established in recent years, questions remain about the impact of such interventions on women’s empowerment, including the importance of gender targeting strategies. We report on a mixed methods evaluation of a gender focused multifaceted anti-poverty, ‘graduation’, programme, in two districts in Malawi. Focused on a sample of 3,200 low- income couples, we conduct a randomised control trial (RCT) with three treatment arms: female recipient, male recipient, and female recipient plus 12-month couples training on family vision and cooperation. The qualitative component involved two rounds of the Qualitative Impact Protocol (QuIP), a method for mapping causal drivers of change from the perspective of female participants, where the qualitative researchers are partially ‘blindfolded’ to reduce pro-project and confirmation bias. The RCT comprised ‘before’ and ‘after’ surveys, separated by 24 months, of both spouses. We find that com- pared to female spouses in control households, all treated female spouses see a significant increase in their productive agency. However, we find that only female spouses in female targeted households who participated in the couples training saw a significant increase in the level of female empowerment and male spouse engagement in ‘female’ household activities, compared to control, female targeted and male targeted households. The qualitative maps indicate how improved sharing of chores reduced disagreements and led to improved household relationships and well-being. We also find evidence from the qualitative research that improved conflict resolution and reduced disagreement did not come from increased income and purchasing power, but directly from gender messaging via both the Graduation program and the couples’ intervention. Inclusion of the qualitative component of the research led to a greater appreciation of the channels of change, improved interpretation of the quantitative findings and validation of the theory of change from the participants’ perspective.

Gender Social Norms and the Mauritania Social Transfer Program
(with Tara Bedi, Claire Boxto, and Julia Vaillant)
To meet its long-term poverty reduction goals, the Government of Mauritania decided to complement its traditional food-based response with targeted interventions to protect the chronically poor and invest in their human capital. Tekavoul (Solidarity in Arabic), a nation-wide social cash transfer program, aims to reach 100,000 extremely poor households by 2020 to protect them from severe deprivation and to support human capital investments. Beneficiaries will receive MRO 15,000 (USD 50) every three months for a period of five years, conditional on participation in social promotion activities addressing hygiene, nutrition, education, civil registration, and child development. Payments will be made to the person in charge of the daily health, nutrition and education of the children in the household, usually the first wife of the male household head or the female household head.  The Trinity Impact Evaluation Unit and the Africa Gender Innovation Lab at the World Bank will conduct a randomized control trial on the effects of adding to Tekavoul a) couples empowerment training and b) community interventions on female empowerment, spousal cohesion and ultimately, welfare outcomes. The objective of this research is to understand the impact of integrating interventions on gender social norms in anti-poverty programs on household welfare and gender empowerment. More specifically, it aims to test whether addressing gender social norms at the household- and community-level help maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of a cash transfer program. The research will collect and analyze data on women’s empowerment, intra-household cooperation, prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV), and welfare outcomes. 

Gender Norms and the Mauritania Social Transfer Program: Qualitative Evidence
(with Tara Bedi, Claire Boxto, Fiona Remnant, Rachael Pierotti and Julia Vaillant)
This proposed qualitative study will examine how the cash transfer and gender norms programming affect participating individuals, households, and communities. It will provide an opportunity to address two of the priority research question areas. First, the research will examine how households respond to encouragement for more collaborative household resource management and greater gender equality in the context of a cash transfer program. Second, the potential for opposing mechanisms of change--with the reduction in economic stress due to the transfers creating opportunities for greater intrahousehold dialogue and cooperation, while gender role strain induced by women’s receipt of the transfers could motivate resistance to the promotion of more equal relationships (Buller et al. 2018). The research team will examine the mechanisms of impact and how they vary across different family structures and/or social groups, as well as across different versions of the IPV prevention program. This will include investigation of changes at the household level and the possibility of socially transformative changes (Molyneux et al. 2016). We will seek to understand specifically why and how participation in group activities can lead to a reduction in intimate partner violence (Roy et al. 2019). To build on the findings of Heath et al. (2020), type of marriage (polygamous/monogamous) and duration of marriage will be examined as possible dimensions of heterogeneity, as the quantitative baseline data is showing higher levels of IPV in polygamous marriages and in more recent marriages.

The Contest for Household Resources: Unpacking the Relationship Between Economic Non-cooperation and Women’s Economic Autonomy
(with Anu Jose, Mousson Estelle Jamel Koussoube, Rachael Pierotti and Julia Vaillant)
Attempts to understand the relationship between women’s empowerment and intimate partner violence (IPV) have been characterised by contradictory theoretical predictions and mixed empirical findings. With a focus on economic autonomy and economic abuse, this paper uses experimental findings from a male-focused gender transformative program in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), interpreted through a non-cooperative household bargaining model, to understand how exogenous changes in male perspectives affect economic abuse women experience for different levels of female economic autonomy. First, at baseline, we find that women who take economic autonomy when their husbands do not acknowledge her autonomy are more likely to experience economic abuse. Second, we find that male-focused gender-transformative programs are successful in households with higher levels of spousal economic contest and abuse. Specifically, the programme reduced economic abuse experienced by the female by an economically significant 6.6 percentage points in households where wife took more economic autonomy at baseline than her husband gave her, compared to households where wife did not contest for economic autonomy. In contrast, the program had no significant effect in reducing economic abuse in households where women did not contest for autonomy. Third, we find no increase in the share of households where women take autonomy, which together with our main result, indicates the presence of a mechanism whereby women trade off economic abuse for greater economic autonomy.

Financial Inclusion, Banking and Consumer Protection

Text Messaging for Financial Behaviour Change in Zambia
(with Syon Bhanot, Anu Jose, Justin Archer, Siegfried Zottel)
Working with Natsave, Zambia, this project employs a novel text-messaging-based intervention to: 1) identify the behavioral barriers that lead to low engagement with formal financial services amongst those using the services; and 2) test strategies to help people overcome those barriers to increase engagement and financial security. Additionally, the study will provide the first evidence on the impact of conversational, two-way text messaging designed to encourage savings and improve loan repayment behaviors through Q&A capabilities and efforts to enhance trust in formal financial products. The study is working with 84,000 Natsave customers and involves both phone surveys and in-person surveys.

The Effect of Debit Card Use on Spending: Evidence from a Field Experiment
(with Chuck Howard, Paolina Medina, Roland Umanan)
This project studies how the choice of a payment method affects total individual spending. Using detailed administrative data from a large field experiment incentivizing bank clients to pay with their debit cards, we test the competing predictions of several behavioural and rational models. According to these models, individuals spend more, less or the same when they pay with debit cards, cash or credit cards. As the adoption of electronic payment methods grows around the world, the direction of our results has direct implications for the personal finances of vulnerable households, as well as for monetary and fiscal policy  to stimulate consumption in the economy.

Flexible Loans and Locked Savings for Female Market Vendors in India
(with Billy Jack and Bhavya Shrivastava)
Small business growth is crucial for helping the poor improve their livelihoods, but expensive and inflexible financial products restrict business owners’ access to credit and constrain profits. Innovations for Poverty Action is supporting research that examines whether new financial products can help Indian female market vendors pursue borrowing strategies tailored to their business needs, while building up a reserve of savings they can use to finance week-to-week inventory purchases. The products feature increased flexibility in borrowing and repayment schedules, as well as an offsetting locked savings account that allows clients to build up savings while reducing interest rates on their loans.

A Digital Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Strategies for Reducing Non-Institutional Fraud and Building Trust in a Digital Market Platform
(with Chaning Jang and Daniel Putman)
The prevalence of fraud in Nigeria makes it hard for MSMEs to distinguish between real communications from digital service providers, and for example, phishing messages from scammers. This leads to a lack of trust in client communications and an unwillingness to use digital services. To address this issue, we explore two promising solutions, a Unique Communication Code (UCC) and education on fraud, to ascertain their impacts on susceptibility to non-institutional fraud and trust in, and willingness to use digital financial services. Conducted in partnership with Amana Market, a digital platform in Nigeria that offers access to market information and financial service to MSMEs, this study involves an RCT with newly onboarded MSMEs. MSMEs will be randomized at onboarding into one of three groups; a control, an arm provided with a UCC and an arm who will receive ongoing education about fraud. To estimate impact, we will use administrative and endline survey data to measure a range of outcomes around susceptibility to fraud, trust in platforms, and engagement with the platform. Findings from this study will help improve consumer protection and support digital security for Africa’s large and growing platform and financial services sectors.

What Matters for Consumer Credit Choice? Evidence from the Philippine Digital Credit Market
(with Paolina Medina, Benjamin Radoc and Roland Umanan)
Digital credit has exploded in popularity over the last decade with the number of digital lenders growing nearly tenfold globally (Venkatesan, 2023). Although digital credit offers significant potential to advance financial inclusion by allowing previously unbanked and underbanked consumers access credit (Bharadwaj and Suri, 2020), the speed and ease of access to digital credit has raised several consumer protection concerns particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In partnership with the Philippine Competition Commission, we will conduct an online survey and embed a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to provide evidence on how loan choice is affected by behaviourally-informed disclosures and alterations to the choice architecture. After passing the screening questions and answering socio-demographic questions, we will randomly assign respondents to one of the eight treatment arms or the control group. The core task involves choosing the most preferred option from six hypothetical digital credit products which vary across a number of product attributes. The control group will be presented with a set of digital loan choices, inspired by real products, and presented similarly to how they are marketed to consumers in the Philippines (with partial information and informed by specific marketing strategies), requiring potential customers to hover the mouse around to access information on nominal interest rates, processing fees, etc. The first two treatment arms involve provision of additional product information, specifically product attributes a regulator might request be presented in the fine print, These two treatment arms present the six products in random order and involve the clarification of product attributes with and without the total cost of credit (effective interest rate). The remaining six treatment arms involve a ranking one of five product attributes, followed by the final treatment which allows the participant to choose the attribute of ranking. Our experiment allows us to explore a number of important debates in the literature. First, explored in other credit markets, is how awareness or naivete about one's own abilities and preferences affect product choice (Alcott et.al. 2022; Ausubel 1991; Campbell 2016). We measure borrowers' overconfidence and perceived time inconsistency, and examine their relationship with individual choice of digital loan products. We are specifically interested in testing how generalized overconfidence and perceived time inconsistency affect the weights that consumers place on contingent costs, such as late payment fees or the cost of repeated borrowing, which are only relevant for individuals who believe they will miss a payment or borrow repeatedly. 

Innovative Lending Products for Women-Led SMEs in Nigeria
(with Tricia Koroknay-Palicz, Sreelakshmi Papineni and Siegfried Zottel)
Women entrepreneurs in Nigeria face higher barriers than men do to access finance, especially in providing traditional forms of collateral for loans, since most assets that lenders accept are typically registered to men. This impact evaluation will measure the impact of an innovative credit product designed to surmount longstanding collateral constraints faced by women entrepreneurs by using cash flow to determine credit worthiness. This study will examine how the cashflow loan product affects firm performance and productivity and changes in the owner’s household income, consumption, power relations, decision-making and standard of living. Working with one of the largest retail banks in Nigeria, this project will involve 6,000 SMEs.

Experimental Evidence on Buy Now Pay Later Usage and Understanding
(with Anu Jose, Jane Kelly and Yvonne McCarthy)
Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) recently has become one of the popular innovations in the Fintech payment sector which allows consumers to spread the cost of a product over a number of months, generally, without interest. While this payment feature offers flexibility to a number of consumers, there is a growing concern on some consumers taking up more debt than they can afford to repay coupled with lack of understanding of related terms and conditions, resulting in financial adversity. Through an online trial, we intend to study the causal effect of BNPL on consumer spending patterns, disentangling the selection and treatment effects of BNPL. Additionally, we test for effective ways to improve consumer comprehension of BNPL products and their terms and conditions.