Empowering women through multifaceted interventions: long-term evidence from a double matching design

Abstract

Empowering women is a policy goal that has received a lot of interest from policy-makers in the developing world in recent years, yet little is known about effective ways to promote it sustainably. Most existing interventions fail to address the multidimensional nature of empowerment. Using a double matching design to construct the sampling frame and to estimate causal effects, I evaluate the long-term impact of a multifaceted policy intervention designed to improve women’s empowerment in the Atlantic region in Colombia. This intervention provided information about women’s rights, soft skills and vocational training, seed capital, and mentoring simultaneously. I find that this intervention has mixed results: there are improvements in incomes and other economic dimensions along with large political and social capital effects, but limited or null impacts on women’s rights knowledge and control over one’s body. Using a list experiment, I even find an increase in the likelihood of intra-household violence. The results highlight the importance of addressing the multidimensional nature of women’s empowerment in policy innovations designed to foster it and incorporating men in these efforts.