Gender Learning 2021 - It Takes Two: Evidence on Targeting Couples for Economic Impact

"Evidence-based policy solutions — as well as some pitfalls to avoid — for those interested in strengthening women’s empowerment and improving development outcomes."

Learn about evidence-based solutions to enhance the impact of development programs by targeting couples.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in development spending are channeled towards women’s economic ... view more

"Evidence-based policy solutions — as well as some pitfalls to avoid — for those interested in strengthening women’s empowerment and improving development outcomes."

Learn about evidence-based solutions to enhance the impact of development programs by targeting couples.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in development spending are channeled towards women’s economic empowerment across a range of sectors. Most of these interventions aim to strengthen women’s empowerment by directly targeting women themselves. Yet women face substantial barriers to empowerment within their own households, including imbalances in bargaining power, behavioral and informational obstacles to coordination, and embedded social norms. Can couples-targeted interventions help women (and men) overcome these barriers?

In a joint session with the Gender Innovation Labs from Africa and East Asia and the Pacific, this Bite+ highlights evidence-based policy solutions — as well as some pitfalls to avoid — for those interested in strengthening women’s empowerment and improving development outcomes. The format is “lightning talks” that draw on new randomized controlled trial evidence from the World Bank, government, and private sector interventions that attempt to engage both women and men in pursuit of gender equality and enhanced program effectiveness.

The session opens with new experimental work from a land reform program in the Philippines that sub-divided collective parcels into individual parcels that will eventually receive a title. The preliminary results from this study, which point to erosion in women’s decision-making power in male-beneficiary households, highlight the need for a couples-based approach to rural land and agriculture interventions. Next, the session offers three examples of how targeting couples can enhance the impact of development programs, including new findings on the relative effectiveness of offering training and inputs to male rubber farmers with or without their spouses in Côte d'Ivoire; an experiment that tests ways to empower women farmers and link them to value chains with one of East Africa’s largest sugar companies; and finally, the first look at new impact results from a set of couples-targeted interventions to strengthen women’s property rights in Uganda. The presentations focus on the relative effectiveness of these low-cost interventions — which include conditional price subsidies and information — on household farms and firms, as well as the within-household impact on decision-making and bargaining. The session concludes with some over-arching lessons from these studies for World Bank operations.

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Hillary C. Johnson

Economist, East Asia, and Pacific Chief Economist Office, World Bank

Hillary C. Johnson is an Economist with the East Asia and Pacific Gender Innovation Lab in the East Asia and Pacific Chief Economist Office at the World Bank. Her expertise is in applied research, including impact evaluations and survey design. She has worked on various topics, including gender, entrepreneurship, and socioemotional skills development, and her work has been published in journals including Science and the Journal of Southeast Asian Economies. She holds a Master's degree in International Development Economics from Université Paris Dauphine.

Aletheia Donald

Economist, Africa Chief Economist Office, World Bank

Aletheia Donald is an Economist at the Gender Innovation Lab, within the World Bank’s Africa Chief Economist Office. Her research focuses on identifying and addressing gender-based constraints to productivity, property rights and prosperity, and improving the quality of their measurement. Before joining the World Bank in 2014, Aletheia was a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Evidence for Policy Design and Head of Research for the NGO Empower Dalit Women of Nepal. She holds an MA in International and Development Economics from Yale University.

Joao Montalvao

Senior Economist, World Bank, Africa

Joao Montalvao is a development economist at the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab, where he is the Thematic Leader for Property Rights. He conducts randomized control trials, generating evidence to improve policy aimed at promoting women's economic empowerment in Africa. Joao has a Ph.D. in economics from the University College London.

Michael O’Sullivan

Senior Economist, World Bank, Africa

Michael O’Sullivan is a development economist and deputy head of the World Bank's Africa Gender Innovation Lab. His research interests include questions around women’s access to and control over land, gender and agricultural markets, and rural women’s access to credit and savings. He holds a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He previously worked on USAID projects for Chemonics International and Mercy Corps and served as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso.