Women’s education through empowerment: Evidence from a community-based program

Journal: World Development Perspectives 33 (2024): 100568. 

Abstract: Poor educational outcomes for women can adversely impact economic and social outcomes. The 1981 Census shows that literacy rates for men were in the range of 56%, while that of women was at 29.76%. This gap of 26+% points is the largest gap in literacy rates between men and woman. The Ministry of Education, partly influenced by the gender movement of the 1970s and partly by the reality of the growing gap between men and women in educational achievements, chose to implement a program that sought to address barriers that women and girls faced in going to school, but that didn’t stop men from accessing schools. This unique program, the Mahila Samakhya (MS), aimed to develop women’s agency and voice to help them negotiate unequal gender norms using community mobilization tools to empower women in decision making, negotiating for space at home and outside.   

In this paper, the authors explore the long-term impacts of MS on educational outcomes in India using the program’s phased rollout to address potential endogeneity concerns in several ways. They use the program’s implementation design to control for the pattern of expansion, district, and birth year fixed effects to account for unobserved heterogeneity in estimating the effect of MS on years of education that women in subsequent birth cohorts experience. To ensure that their estimates are robust to the effects of other programs that may have been run in parallel by the central government, such as say Operation Blackboard, or Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, they estimate a triple difference estimator to capture the faster rise in educational outcomes of women on account of the MS program, than co-located men, usually in the same village, but sometimes even in the same household.  

Their estimates suggest that women who were in the 0–6 years of age at the time MS was rolled-out in their districts, saw the largest gains over men of similar ages by 1.18 additional years. This mean years of education for women in the period 1989-2007 was about 3.47 years. Thus, the program was able to create a 34% improvement in the years of education for women. An important policy implication from our work is that broad-based empowerment programs can address gender disparities even within the context of large national programs with decentralized governance and implementation. The MS program continues in some states where the state government has found merit in retaining it, while the national program has ceased to exist.  Their work shows that sometimes the impact of these empowerment programs is intergenerational and impacts can take time to manifest statistically.