Research Highlights Featured Chart
February 18, 2020
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Women in Africa face many more challenges to starting a business than their male counterparts.
borgogniels
Two decades ago, all 191 UN member states signed on to the World Health Organization’s promise to promote gender equality by 2015—the third of eight so-called Millennium Development Goals.
But how to fulfill those lofty aspirations remains elusive. There are still wide disparities in the lives of men and women across developing nations.
A sharper focus on supporting adolescent girls could help jump-start a new generation of more empowered women, according to a paper in the January issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
Authors Oriana Bandiera, Niklas Buehren, Robin Burgess, Markus Goldstein, Selim Gulesci, Imran Rasul, and Munshi Sulaiman ran an experiment in Uganda that significantly increased female entrepreneurship, a key step to giving women economic control over their lives.
The researchers carried out the experiment with the nonprofit BRAC, which operates social clubs for girls aged 11-21 in several countries. The clubs provide a safe space for girls to read, dance, or play games with friends. And, central to the research design, they are headed by mentors who teach family planning and financial literacy.
Figure 3 from the authors’ paper summarizes how much the program encouraged business skills among participants.
Figure 3 from Bandiera, et al. (2020)
The red line represents estimates of changes in self-reported skills—on a scale from one to ten—4 years after the BRAC program. (ITT stands for intention-to-treat, an estimation method that accounts for attrition.) The blue dashed lines are 95 percent confidence intervals. The black line indicates zero on the graph.
Girls who got vocational training and sex education saw their scores on identifying business opportunities, managing employees, bargaining over prices, and collecting debts increase compared to girls in control communities.
For instance, participants saw a 0.25 point increase in their financial-management score.
Beyond entrepreneurial skills, club members also experienced short-term income gains and more self-employment.
The success of the program depended on creating an opportunity for Ugandan women to take more control over the timing of their pregnancies. With more ability to delay motherhood, women had time to invest in the skills needed to compete on the job market or in business and reap the benefits later.
The programs scale, and success in other countries, makes it a leading example for nonprofits looking to level the playing field for women.