Karachiwalla, Naureen

Kassim, Yumna

Gilligan, Daniel

El-Enbaby, Hoda

Kurdi, Sikandra

Women’s control over decision-making within their family, particularly regarding the use of household income, can play an important and long-lasting role in shaping their well-being and that of their children. Cash transfer programs often target women in order to increase their control over household resources. Empirical evidence on the effectiveness of this approach is mixed and suggests the importance of local context. We present evidence on the effect of cash transfers on women’s control over decision-making in the MENA region, where little evidence is available and where cultural norms around women’s roles differ from more-studied regions. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we identify the impact of Egypt’s “Takaful” national cash transfer program on women’s control over decision-making and labor supply. Receiving cash transfers mostly reduced women’s reported ability to influence household decisions, particularly regarding child healthcare. The loss of control over decision-making was greater for women with less than primary education. Other effects of the program include a decline in women’s employment and an increase in men’s involvement in spheres of decision-making usually controlled by women. These results are robust to changes in model specification. We present suggestive evidence from mediation analysis that the negative effects on women’s control over decision-making was directly related to these declines in employment and increase in men’s involvement in female spheres. The negative findings are not wholly supported by complementary qualitative work in which women reported more positive perceptions of the program’s impacts.

Cash transfers and women’s control over decision-making and labor supply in Egypt

ElDidi, Hagar

Petesch, Patti

Moataz, Yasmine

Goessinger, Karmin-Yassin

This qualitative evaluation of the Takaful cash transfer program was conducted between January and April 2018 by a team of researchers trained in qualitative methods. The evaluation sought to further delve into and explain dimensions of the Takaful transfers’ impact on beneficiaries that were previously under-investigated in the quantitative survey. In so doing, the quantitative components’ findings were also further contextualized and clarified. This qualitative component’s main goals, therefore, were to explore the differences between the transfers’ impact on ultra-poor households and households near the threshold, the differences in how the two household types use the transfer, and the impact of the transfers on intrahousehold decision making with special focus on women.

Impact evaluation study for Egypt's Takaful and Karama cash transfer program: Part 2: Qualitative Report

Breisinger, Clemens

Gillian, Daniel

El Enbaby, Hoda

Jilani, Amir

Thai, Giang

Goessinger, Karim-Yassin

Since March 2015, the Government of Egypt has been providing cash to poor households through the Takaful and Karama program. The program is run by the Ministry of Social Solidarity (MoSS). Takaful supports poor families with children under 18 years of age, while Karama supports the poor elderly and disabled. For Takaful, the amount of cash that households receive depends on the number of children and their school level, while the Karama transfer is a set rate per individual. In 2018, Takaful will also begin requiring households in the program to make sure their children attend school and participate in health screenings. The program was evaluated by IFPRI, an international research organization, using both quantitative statistical methods (simple questions asked to many households during a survey) and qualitative methods (more in-depth questions asked to fewer households in longer interviews). The main goal of this evaluation was to measure and explain how the transfers affected the welfare of households in the program. In addition, the evaluation describes how well the program selection criteria work for identifying poor households.

Impact evaluation study for Egypt's Takaful and Karama cash transfer program: Synthesis report- Summary of key findings form the quantitative and qualitative impact evaluation studies

Jilani, Amir Hamza

Egypt has been providing cash to poor households through its first conditional cash transfer program, Takaful and Karama, a social protection program run by the Ministry of Social Solidarity (MoSS), since March 2015. Takaful (“Solidarity”) supports poor families with children under 18, while Karama (“Dignity”) supports the elderly poor and people living with disabilities. The cash transfer program has enrolled 2.25 million families across all of Egypt’s governorates. The amount of the Takaful cash transfer provided to households depends on the number of children and their school level. The Karama program provides a set amount per individual. In order to reach the poorest households, participants are selected using a proxy means test. In the Takaful program, 89 percent of recipients are women, while only 11 percent are men. Beginning in 2018, Takaful will also begin implementing conditionalities, requiring households in the program to ensure their children attend school and participate in health screenings, added to antenatal care for pregnant women and post-natal care. The Takaful and Karama program was evaluated by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) using both quantitative statistical methods (simple questions asked to many households during a survey) and qualitative methods (more in-depth questions asked to fewer households in longer interviews). The evaluation was designed to measure and explain the impacts of the cash transfers on household welfare, and to examine whether the program’s criteria for household selection were effective in identifying poor households. This brief, which focuses on the Takaful component of the program, summarizes the main findings from the evaluation and key recommendations.

Egypt’s Takaful and Karama cash transfer program: Evaluation of program impacts and recommendations

Abay, Kibrom A.

Spielman, David J.

Abate, Gashaw Tadesse

Chamberlin, Jordan

This paper presents results from a framed field experiment in which participants make decisions about extraction of a common-pool resource, a community forest. The experiment was designed and piloted as both a research activity and an experiential learning intervention during 2017-2018 with 120 groups of resource users (split by gender) from 60 habitations in two Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. We examine whether local beliefs and norms about community forest, gender of participants, within-experiment treatments (non-communication, communication, and optional election of institutional arrangements (rules)) and remuneration methods affect harvest behaviour and groups’ tendency to cooperate. Furthermore, we explore whether the experiment and subsequent community debriefing had learning effects. Results reveal a “weak” Nash Equilibrium in which participants harvested substantially less than the Nash prediction even in the absence of communication, a phenomenon stronger for male than female participants in both states. For male groups in both states, both communication and optional rule election are associated with lower group harvest per round, as compared to the reference non-communication game. For female groups in both states, however, communication itself did not significantly slow down resource depletion; but the introduction of optional rule election did reduce harvest amounts. For both men and women in Andhra Pradesh and men in Rajasthan, incentivized payments to individual participants significantly lowered group harvest, relative to community flat payment, suggesting a possible “crowding-in” effect on pro-social norms. Despite the generally positive memory of the activity, reported actual changes are limited. This may be due to the lack of follow-up with the communities between the experiment and the revisit. The fact that many of the communities already have a good understanding of the importance of the relationships between (not) cutting trees and the ecosystem services from forests, with rules and strong internal norms against cutting that go beyond the felling of trees in the game, may have also meant that the game did not have as much to add. Findings have methodological and practical implications for designing behavioral intervention programs to improve common-pool resource governance.

Digital tools and agricultural market transformation in Africa: Why are they not at scale yet, and what will it take to get there?

Kassim, Yumna

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