Kumar Neha, Raghunathan Kalyani, Arrieta Alejandra, Jilani Amir, Pandey Shinjini
International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, United States.
International Food Policy Research Institute, New Delhi, India.
World Dev. 2021 Oct;146:105579. doi: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105579.
Women's groups are important rural social and financial institutions in South Asia. In India, a large majority of women's groups programs are implemented through self-help groups (SHGs). Originally designed as savings and credit groups, the role of SHGs has expanded to include creating health and nutrition awareness, improving governance, and addressing social issues related to gender- and caste-based discrimination. This paper uses panel data from 1470 rural Indian women from five states to study the impact of SHG membership on women's empowerment in agriculture, using the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and the abbreviated Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI). Because SHG membership was not randomized and women who self-select to be SHG members may be systematically different from non-members, we employ nearest neighbor matching methods to attribute the impact of SHG membership on women's empowerment in agriculture and intrahousehold inequality. Our findings suggest that SHG membership has a significant positive impact on aggregate measures of women's empowerment and reduces the gap between men's and women's empowerment scores. This improvement in aggregate empowerment is driven by improvements in women's scores, not a deterioration in men's. Greater control over income, greater decisionmaking over credit, and (somewhat mechanistically, given the treatment) greater and more active involvement in groups within the community lead to improvements in women's scores. However, impacts on other areas of empowerment are limited. The insignificant impacts on attitudes towards domestic violence and respect within the household suggest that women's groups alone may be insufficient to change deep-seated gender norms that disempower women. Our results have implications for the design and scale-up of women's group-based programs in South Asia, including the possibility that involving men is needed to change gender norms.
妇女团体是南亚重要的农村社会和金融机构。在印度，绝大多数妇女团体项目是通过自助团体（SHGs）实施的。自助团体最初被设计为储蓄和信贷团体，其作用已扩大到包括提高健康和营养意识、改善治理以及解决与基于性别和种姓的歧视相关的社会问题。本文使用来自印度五个邦的1470名农村妇女的面板数据，利用项目层面的农业领域妇女赋权指数（pro-WEAI）和简化的农业领域妇女赋权指数（A-WEAI），研究加入自助团体对妇女农业赋权的影响。由于加入自助团体并非随机分配，自行选择成为自助团体成员的女性可能与非成员存在系统性差异，因此我们采用最近邻匹配方法来确定加入自助团体对妇女农业赋权和家庭内部不平等的影响。我们的研究结果表明，加入自助团体对妇女赋权的总体衡量指标有显著的积极影响，并缩小了男女赋权得分之间的差距。总体赋权的这种改善是由女性得分的提高推动的，而非男性得分的下降。对收入的更大控制权、对信贷的更大决策权，以及（鉴于这种干预措施，某种程度上是机械地）在社区内团体中更积极的参与，都导致了女性得分的提高。然而，对其他赋权领域的影响有限。对家庭暴力态度和家庭内部尊重方面的影响不显著，这表明仅靠妇女团体可能不足以改变使妇女处于无权地位的根深蒂固的性别规范。我们的研究结果对南亚基于妇女团体的项目的设计和扩大规模具有启示意义，包括可能需要让男性参与来改变性别规范。
