69397
     Nicaragua: Economic Empowerment of Rural
     Women

     Task Team Leader: Renos Vakis

     Team: Ana Maria Munoz Boudet, Patrick Premand


                Why?
Rural women face constraints in accessing economic resources such as land, assets or credit. Unequal access to
resources can contribute to poverty persistence and limit upwards mobility. Productive transfers targeted to
women directly increase their control over productive assets and foster economic activities. These direct benefits
can lead to broader gains and possibly create a virtuous cycle. For instance, productive transfers can improve
outcomes such as access to credit, participation in intra-household decision-making or self-esteem. As such,
productive transfers targeted to women can increase productivity and returns on households’ investment, driving
income growth and poverty reduction.
Several interventions have tried to foster economic empowerment to generate sustainable productivity and
welfare gains. In Nicaragua, the government implemented the “Atencion a Crisis� CCT pilots, a traditional CCT
augmented by productive transfers (small business grants or vocational training) and delivered by central agencies.
The “Atencion a Crisis� pilots led to broad gains in HD outcomes. Consultations with several local stakeholders
revealed an interest to test the effectiveness of an alternative model that may lead to even larger gains by:
    Providing additional training (including gender awareness) and technical assistance along with transfers
    Further leveraging local leadership and social spill-overs by using cooperatives as delivery mechanism
    Maintaining a strong IE design and benchmarking a monitoring system to make it available to local institutions


                What?
The purpose of the productive transfer pilot is to help poor Nicaraguan rural women and their families to improve
welfare by giving them access to human, social, productive and financial capital. The project will also rigorously
evaluate the impact of the intervention on empowerment and economic development. Specifically, the project
seeks to:
    Promote women’s engagement in economic activities that can lead to improvements in household welfare
    Promote gender awareness to increase poor women´s self esteem and participation in household decisions
    Promote cooperatives that foster women’s economic and entrepreneurial development


                How?
A local agency (NGO) implements a ‘productive transfer intervention’ in 13 communities of a severely poor
Nicaraguan municipality (Santa Maria de Pantasma). Project beneficiaries receive the following benefits:

   Gender awareness training (strengthening social capital formation and promoting female leadership, as well
    as masculinities and non-violent gender relations for partners)
   Productive transfers (in kind and cash) to undertake income-diversification activities. Packages include a
    combination of inputs for small-scale agricultural production and small grants to start micro-businesses.
   Formation of cooperatives and seeds banks.
   Capacity building, technical, and entrepreneurial assistance.
 Nicaragua: Economic Empowerment of Rural
 Women

 Task Team Leader: Renos Vakis

 Team: Ana Maria Munoz Boudet, Patrick Premand



       Outcomes
The project is currently under implementation. The following outputs have been delivered.
   A monitoring system has been designed and set-up.
   An impact evaluation design was develolped in close coordination with the implementing agency.
   A baseline census collected information for 2000 households in 24 communities in the pilot region.
   Targeting and beneficiary selection process identified potential participants in 24 communities.
   A public lottery transparently selected 13 communities to participate in the pilot.
   Distribution of benefits: 400 beneficiaries received gender awareness training, community organization
      training and the first part of their productive transfers.

The impact evaluation will assess the effect of the program on a range of outcomes, including:
   Welfare (consumption, poverty, income)
   Income diversification (percentage of households active in non-subsistence activities, in non-agricultural
      activities, in micro-businesses…)
   Empowerment (intra-household decision-making, asset ownership, access to credit, self-esteem…)

The IE will assess the impact of the intervention on the group of women who selected into the intervention, but also
on women who selected out of the intervention in treatment communities (who may still benefit from spill-overs).



                Lessons Learned
Targeting via community organizations:
    Women who selected into the program are better off and more empowered that women who selected out.
      While this may also be affected by varying degrees of information, the effectiveness of this delivery
      mechanism in reaching the poorest and least empowered women will ultimately depend on the magnitude of
      potential spill-over effects (especially as interaction with peers have been shown to have strong impacts in the
      context of the “Atencion a Crisis� pilots.)

Monitoring and Evaluation (many more lessons to come after follow-up survey…):
   Close coordination with implementing agency and sustained capacity-building is required in designing and
     implementing the impact evaluation.
   A rigorous randomized evaluation is feasible at low cost.
   Indicators in the monitoring system and the impact evaluation need to be harmonized.

Implementation
   The intervention design needs to be flexible in presence of uncertainty in key parameters such as take-up
     rates, beneficiaries’ preferences for the various benefit packages,…