Abstract
Empowering women is a policy goal that have received a lot of interest by policy-makers in the developing world in recent years, yet little is known about effective ways to promote it in a sustainable way. Most existing interventions fail to address the multidimensional nature of empowerment, making it difficult to understand whether they are effective ways to achieve this goal. Using a novel double matching design to construct the sampling frame and to estimate causal effects, I evaluate the long-term impact of a multi-faceted policy intervention attempting to improve women's empowerment in the Atlantic region in Colombia. This intervention aims to foster women entrepreneurship by simultaneously providing them with information about women’s rights, soft-skills and vocational training, seed capital, and mentoring. I find that this intervention has mixed results: improvements in incomes and other economic dimensions along with important political and social capital effects but limited or null impacts on women’s rights knowledge and control over one’s body. I even find an increase in the likelihood of intra-household violence using a list experiment. The results highlight the importance of addressing the multidimensional nature of women's empowerment as a way to understand the scope and limitations of policy innovations designed to foster it.
Acerca del expositor
Stanislao Maldonado es profesor asistente en el Departamento de Economía de la Universidad del Rosario en Bogotá, Colombia. Stanislao es Ph.D. en Economía Agrícola y de los Recursos de la Universidad de California en Berkeley y economista de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos en Lima, Perú. Sus intereses de investigación se encuentran en la intersección entre la economía del desarrollo, la economía ambiental y la economía política. Antes de sus estudios de doctorado, trabajó en el Banco Mundial (Washington, DC) en proyectos de investigación sobre pobreza, desigualdad, malnutrición, pensiones y mercados laborales para varios países de América Latina. En Perú, fue investigador del Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Participación (CEDEP) y consultor de la Comisión Especial de Estudios de la Discapacidad del Congreso de Perú.