The Economic Lives of Young Women in the Time of Ebola : Lessons from an Empowerment Program

Bandiera, Oriana ; Buehren, Niklas ; Goldstein, Markus ; Rasul, Imran ; Smurra, Andrea

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: GENDER;    WOMEN;    VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN;    SOCIAL PROTECTION;    VOCATIONAL TRAINING;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8760
RP-ID  :  WPS8760

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper evaluates an intervention toraise young women's economic empowerment in SierraLeone, where women frequently experience sexual violence andface multiple economic disadvantages. The interventionprovides them with a protective space (a club) where theycan find support, receive information on health andreproductive issues, and vocational training. Unexpectedly,the post-baseline period coincided with the 2014 Ebolaoutbreak. The analysis leverages quasi-random across-villagevariation in the severity of Ebola-related disruption, andrandom assignment of villages to the intervention todocument the impact of the Ebola outbreak on the economiclives of 4,700 women tracked over the crisis, and anyameliorating role played by the intervention. In highlydisrupted control villages, the crisis leads younger girlsto spend significantly more time with men, out-of-wedlockpregnancies rise, and as a result, they experience apersistent 16 percentage points drop in school enrolmentpost-crisis. These adverse effects are almost entirelyreversed in treated villages because the interventionenables young girls to allocate time away from men,preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and enabling them tore-enrol in school post-crisis. In treated villages, theunavailability of young women leads some older girls to usetransactional sex as a coping strategy. The interventioncauses them to increase contraceptive use so this does nottranslate into higher fertility. The analysis pinpoints themechanisms through which the severity of the aggregate shockimpacts the economic lives of young women and shows howinterventions in times of crisis can interlink outcomesacross younger and older cohorts.