The effect of cash transfers on women's well-being: Lessons from evidence in Latin America

Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women—understood as abuse or aggression that occurs in a romantic relationship—is an ongoing problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC); The World Health Organization estimates that one out of four women in the region has been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence since age 15. In the Americas, 40 percent of women's homicides were perpetrated by a family member or an intimate partner; over the last 10 years, female intimate partner/family related homicides increased by 9 percent.

Due to the harmful effects of IPV, it is imperative to modify the interpersonal, social, and institutional factors related to the prevalence and intensity of this problem. Fortunately, there are some strategies to address these issues that have been tested in other contexts. Although similar efforts are in place throughout the LAC region, further research is needed to assess their effectiveness rigorously.

This blog post showcases some of these interventions with potential for positive impacts as a call to contribute to the generation of reliable evidence for policy-making in the struggle against IPV.  

Changing individual behaviors and attitudes

One strategy to reduce IPV is to change gender attitudes and pernicious behaviors among youth and adults. To reduce dating violence—a predictor of IPV in adulthood—interventions aimed at young people have shown encouraging outcomes in urban contexts with high exposure to violence and in populations with a large presence of Hispanics. These approaches have been implemented in LAC and preliminary results suggest probabilities of success: In Mexico, a quasi-experimental evaluation was conducted on the school program “Amor... pero del bueno” (True love), which sought to combat dating violence. Among its primary outcomes was a reduction of 58 percent in the perpetration of psychological violence by the participating young men.

In a pandemic context, virtual interventions have gained relevance to address IPV. As a case in point, in 2020, J-PAL affiliate Erica Field and Javier Romero evaluated a messaging campaign to reduce intimate partner violence in urban areas of Peru. This intervention aims to provide participating men with emotion management tools in a context of low mobility and scarce resources; results are forthcoming. 

Challenging gender stereotypes and social norms

Another path of action, also supported by empirical evidence, consists of community-based interventions that address gender stereotypes and social norms in low and middle-income countries. Successful interventions should actively involve community members in strategic roles, such as facilitators or local leaders, but cultural adaptation is also essential for effectiveness.

For example, the SASA! Activist Kit for Preventing Violence against Women and HIV, assessed through a randomized evaluation in Uganda, is an intervention based on the training of “local activists” who, through informal activities, encourage critical analysis of the domination exercised over women and how men can use their influence to positively change community dynamics. Initially applied in sub-Saharan African countries, SASA! has been adapted in Haiti; preliminary figures indicate that 94 percent of participants agreed with the statement “a man has no right to slap a woman if he is mad.” In addition, the number of male participants who said “it is a woman's fault if she is raped” was reduced by half.

Community interventions can also contribute to improvements in exercising women's sexual and reproductive rights. An assessment conducted in rural Guatemala found that community workshops for changing gender social norms and promoting the use of contraceptive methods modified the attitudes of male participants, encouraging joint decision-making, and generally improving the level of knowledge about modern contraceptive methods.

Institutional change to eradicate femicides 

A third strategy consists in promoting institutional changes. Femicides are the ultimate expression of IPV, and the most common institutional responses in the region consist of legal modifications and the recognition of femicide as a criminal offense. However, legal reforms are hard to implement, and interventions related to changes in the functioning of law enforcement organizations might have positive effects in reducing violence against women.

Interventions tested in the United States and England suggest that early police involvement reduces the likelihood of recidivism among perpetrators, and research shows that innovations in crime reporting ease women's access to the criminal justice system and reduce the likelihood that the violence they experience will escalate. As part of the promissory practices in place in LAC, a quasi-experimental evaluation conducted in Brazil links the existence of precincts focused on the criminal prosecution of rape and IPV to a reduction in the rate of female homicides by 1.23 deaths per 100,000 among women aged 15-49 in urban municipalities.

The way forward

The studies and examples explored here show potential paths to action: for decision-makers, these are some examples of options to be tested on a broader scale; for researchers, this is an invitation to gather evidence in LAC in order to design better public policies aimed at addressing IPV. For instance, J-PAL’s Gender and Economic Agency Initiative is a great opportunity to build an understanding of the role of women’s economic empowerment in addressing IPV in the region.

One in three female workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are self-employed. Surveys in eight countries across the region showed that about fifty percent of firms with five or less employees—micro firms— are run by women. These numbers demonstrate how important women are to the workforce in LAC. 

Micro and small firms are also key and serve as the predominant form of economic activity in low and middle-income countries. Despite this, there is a significant gender gap in business performance. When compared to businesses run by men, female-owned firms are smaller in terms of employees, sales, costs, and physical capital. Additionally, women face more challenges in growing their micro-firms into small and medium-sized businesses.

Female microentrepreneurs encounter numerous unique barriers to running successful businesses that can vary across countries. Households’ responsibilities and social norms related to chores at home could be some obstacles. For example, a survey from Mexico in 2002 examining micro-firms found that, on average, women entrepreneurs devoted about 25 percent fewer hours to their business relative to male microentrepreneurs, potentially due to family or household obligations. In Bolivia, another survey from the World Bank in 2007 found that 71 percent of female business owners perceived family obligations or household chores as an obstacle to their firm’s operation and growth and were 14 percent less likely to have taken part in any business training than men. Further still, a survey from the World Bank in 2008 focused on Peru did not find meaningful differences between female and male entrepreneurs regarding schooling and hours devoted to the business.  

Emerging evidence on skills training

One approach to helping female microentrepreneurs overcome these challenges is business training. However, training women in standard management practices may be insufficient to make their businesses grow if they face additional barriers like economic constraints and rigid social norms. There is limited evidence on how the impacts of alternative business training models vary for women, and the studies that ‌examine the impact by gender find mixed results. However, a growing body of literature suggests that alternative training programs that are delivered one-on-one, tailored to participants’ needs, teach easy-to-apply skills, or foster entrepreneurial mindsets may be more effective than those delivering more traditional curricula. Therefore, it is worth checking whether alternatives to the traditional business training models are better suited to address female entrepreneurs' needs. 

As part of J-PAL LAC series blog series launched this past International Women’s Day, we are outlining lessons for policymakers from randomized evaluations of three promising programs conducted in countries across LAC that address the gender gap in business performance.

The promise of alternative training in LAC

One alternative model of training is heuristics, or rule-of-thumb, training, which aims to simplify standard business training into a set of routines that can be more easily understood. Rather than trying to teach accounting, for example, such training focuses on basic financial principles like keeping household and business money in two separate drawers. This type of approach holds appeal for training the smallest businesses and business owners lacking formal education in these areas of need.

Heuristic training in the Dominican Republic

The first example of Heuristic training we present was a study conducted in the Dominican Republic. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation and found that a rule-of-thumb financial training, in which nearly all participants were women, was indeed more effective than standard accounting training in improving business’ best practices among microentrepreneurs with incomplete high school education or without previous financial training.

Heuristic training in Ecuador

Similarly, in Ecuador, a rule-of-thumb financial training increased daily profits and sales, particularly among female microentrepreneurs and people experiencing more stressors and things to keep in mind, such as taking care of children or house duties. While evidence on the long-lasting effects of heuristics training is in its initial stages, this simplified training model shows promise in supporting the most vulnerable microentrepreneurs.

Role models training in Chile

Lastly, J-PAL affiliated professors Jeanne Lafortune and José Tessada, together with Julio Riutort, evaluated another alternative training model in Chile, where over 90 percent of the participants were women. The researchers incorporated role models or personalized advice into standard training programs, including testimonial sharing from previous participants of a traditional training program who became successful microentrepreneurs. The study found that Role models increased confidence among less experienced participants and were more cost-efficient than technical assistance. Role models helped to increase participants’ aspirations in addition to confidence. 

These alternative and personalized training programs are promising paths to improve management among female microentrepreneurs, but it is still necessary to conduct more research on them. Although they were implemented in three different countries of LAC, they are experiences that could be adapted and piloted across the region if we understand what drives their results. 

Designing programs tailored to female entrepreneurs’ needs

Alternative business training programs that are tailored to participants’ needs, teach easy-to-apply skills, or go beyond traditional curricula to foster entrepreneurial mindsets could be an effective solution to mitigate the gender gap in business management and, as a result, the income gap.

J-PAL has two initiatives that could address this issue by funding and supporting the generation of rigorous policy-relevant research in LAC: 

1. The Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI), expanded in 2021 to Brazil as JOI Brazil, will provide targeted funding to test the most promising innovations addressing pressing employment challenges in Brazil. JOI Brazil will then disseminate the knowledge created to governments, civil society organizations, the private sector, as well as foundations in the country. The initiative will prioritize gender as a cross-cutting issue throughout its research topics. 
2. The Gender and Economic Agency Initiative also funds randomized evaluations of strategies to enhance women’s economic agency. A priority theme is enhancing women’s labor potential and work readiness. 

If your organization is implementing or planning to implement projects focused on alleviating the gender management gap or strategies to enhance women’s economic agency contact us at [email protected]

This blog post is part of a blog series commemorating International Women’s Day. Register here for receiving a notice when new pieces are published. You can also check the first and third blog posts of the series. We want to thank Daniela Muhaj, and María Paz Monge for their input on this piece. 

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a pressing issue in Peru, as well as in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. In Peru, in 2018, 38 percent of 15–49 year old women reported they had suffered physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) at some point in their lives. Also in 2018, 121 women were killed by their current or former intimate partner and almost one in 100,000 died in a gender-related homicide. Lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic did not help: During 2020, the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP) hotline for domestic or sexual violence received almost two times as many reports as compared to the previous year.

In recognition of this rising and deadly problem, expenditure to fight violence against women has grown during the last years and even doubled in 2019 compared to the year before. However, simply spending more is not enough if funds are not targeted toward the most effective (and cost-effective) programs to fight violence against women.

A tripartite collaboration

How can we identify the best strategies to confront GBV? With this question in mind, in 2016 MIMP, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Peru, and J-PAL LAC launched a collaboration to develop a learning cycle for institutionalization of evidence-informed decision-making in Peru. 

This learning cycle involves diagnosing the problem and gathering the related evidence, designing and evaluating interventions that address it, and using the results to inform policy decisions. Additionally, it is important to ensure that local teams have the capacity to participate actively in the different stages of this cycle.

Following this framework, the three partners in this effort and researchers have completed or are in the process of carrying out several activities, such as:

• Conducting a needs assessment.
• Constructing an evidence bank that organizes studies on domestic violence attention, domestic violence prevention, and strengthening women’s autonomy.
• Designing several interventions and evaluation strategies.
• Holding a social incubator with workshops for government employees on “Evidence-based intervention design” and “Impact evaluation design.” 

The interventions being tested

As a result of the joint work of MIMP, IPA, J-PAL LAC, and several researchers, including Jorge Agüero, Úrsula Aldana, Chris Boyer, Erica Field, Verónica Frisancho, Daniel Hurtado, Andrew Morrison, Claudia Piras, and Javier Romero, four interventions are taking place and being evaluated.

The first is Leaders in Action, a two-year long community-based intervention. During the course, two leaders per village take part in trainings in “soft skills” and discuss topics such as beliefs and stereotypes surrounding gender roles, norms regarding violence, and strategies to identify and prevent GBV. This follows a “train the trainers” model: Once the training is over, the leaders guide five additional training sessions in their communities, enlarging the pool of community volunteers per village. Finally, leaders and volunteers under the coordination of the MIMP execute training sessions and workshops, awareness and mobilization campaigns, and door-to-door visits to change social norms and attitudes around GBV.

The program, which is currently operating at large scale and could be expanded further, began in 2018 by identifying women at risk of violence and running a baseline survey. Once the target households were defined, the leaders and volunteers started the door-to-door campaign to monitor the incidence of GBV, spot potential cases of violence, encourage take-up of existing support services, and change social norms around GBV through an eight-session training.

In 2019, in the same vein as Leaders in Action, the institutions and researchers designed an impact evaluation and baseline data collection of another flagship domestic violence program run by the government, Men for Equality (MFE). This program targets men across the country to change incidence of IPV and the gender norms around it by training male volunteers to deliver peer-to-peer workshops and home gender sensitization training. 

In addition to limiting physical contact, the Covid-19 pandemic has added different kinds of pressure to households—such as financial stress, unemployment, and food insecurity—which have the potential to trigger domestic conflicts. Therefore, in 2020, MIMP temporarily paused its in-person interventions and worked on designing a bundle of interventions to be delivered remotely to individuals at risk of experiencing or perpetrating domestic violence, including awareness and information campaigns delivered via text messages and street-level information campaigns.

As part of those programs, the three organizations proposed to co-create and evaluate an awareness campaign delivered via text messages, targeted specifically to men at risk of perpetrating IPV. The campaign drew on psychological interventions designed to better manage impulse control and channel emotional outbursts in order to mitigate episodes of violence. The proposed intervention and evaluation work with the same male trainers and peers as the MFE.

Along with this intervention, and in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee, USAID-DIV, and the Inter-American Development Bank, we are currently replicating a program that builds on behavioral science findings by capitalizing on men’s existing aspirational identities to encourage positive behavior change. The Real Man Challenge ("Hablemos Entre Patas" in Spanish), which is based on an intervention implemented in Liberia and was previously tested in Uganda, is delivered via WhatsApp by a set of trained male monitors to a group of nearly fifty men from their personal network. Over the course of thirty days, each host shares daily behavioral skill-building challenges on relationships and households, and moderates group discussions to improve relationship dynamics, reduce violence, and change men’s attitudes towards violence against women.

The results of the evaluations are forthcoming. Once that information is available and made public, policymakers can take it into account to improve—and perhaps eventually scale—the programs.

Continuing the learning cycle

This collaboration, which was recently renewed for the next three years, exemplifies how to address pressing issues with evidence and collaboration between academia, government, and civil society. Following a learning cycle is an excellent way to incorporate evidence into decision-making processes, and organizations like J-PAL and IPA are well positioned to support governments in the process of creating a culture of evidence use. Additionally, this process is generating new insights on how to continue fighting gender-based violence in Peru and similar contexts.

This blog post is part of a blog series commemorating International Women’s Day, which took place in March 2022. Sign up here to receive a notification when new pieces are published and check out the first and second blog posts in the series. We want to thank Isabela Salgado for her input on this piece.