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Empowering Women under Social Constraints: Evidence from a Field Intervention in Rural Egypt

Author

Listed:
  • Elsayed, Ahmed

    (American University in Cairo)

  • Roushdy, Rania

    (American University in Cairo)

Abstract
Women in the MENA region are economically and socially disempowered. High youth unemployment rates together with discriminatory social norms drive them to limit their investment in human capital. We evaluate a large-scale intervention attempting to relax human capital constraints for women by offering vocational, business and life skills training in 30 villages in rural Egypt. Relative to women in the control villages, the intervention increased the likelihood of treated women engaging in income-generating activities, driven by an increase in self-employment. Treated women also became more likely to have future business aspirations. However, their intra-household decision-making and gender equality attitudes were not affected by the intervention. We show that these results mask heterogeneous effects in terms of background characteristics and initial levels of social empowerment. We find no evidence of positive spillover effects for the program within treated villages and, more importantly, no evidence of different pre-trends in employment between the treated and control groups prior to the intervention.

Suggested Citation

  • Elsayed, Ahmed & Roushdy, Rania, 2017. "Empowering Women under Social Constraints: Evidence from a Field Intervention in Rural Egypt," IZA Discussion Papers 11240, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11240
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    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp11240.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Caroline Krafft & Reham Rizk, 2018. "The Promise and Peril of Youth Entrepreneurship in MENA," Working Papers 1257, Economic Research Forum, revised 19 Nov 2018.
    2. Bairagya, Indrajit, 2021. "Impact of formal vocational training on the earnings of self-employed individuals in rural India," Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Elsevier, vol. 16(C).
    3. Bargain, Olivier & Boutin, Delphine & Champeaux, Hugues, 2019. "Women's political participation and intrahousehold empowerment: Evidence from the Egyptian Arab Spring," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    4. Florence Jura, 2021. "The Necessity of Vocational Training as a Tool for Empowering Rural Women in Ward Five, Mashonaland East, Zimbabwe," International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), vol. 5(3), pages 225-231, March.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    empowerment of women; field intervention; Egypt;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I25 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Economic Development
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

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