Female Empowerment: Impact of a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines

Nava Ashraf*, Dean Karlan, Wesley Yin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

231 Scopus citations

Abstract

Female "empowerment" has increasingly become a policy goal, both as an end to itself and as a means to achieving other development goals. Microfinance in particular has often been argued, but not without controversy, to be a tool for empowering women. Here, using a randomized controlled trial, we examine whether access to and marketing of an individually held commitment savings product lead to an increase in female decision-making power within the household. We find positive impacts, particularly for women who have below median decision-making power in the baseline, and we find this leads to a shift toward female-oriented durables goods purchased in the household.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)333-344
Number of pages12
JournalWorld Development
Volume38
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2010

Funding

We thank the Green Bank of Caraga for cooperation throughout this experiment, John Owens and the USAID/Philippines Microenterprise Access to Banking Services Program team for helping to get the project started, Chona Echavez for collaborating on the field work, Robin Burgess, Pascaline Dupas, Larry Katz, Sendhil Mullainathan and Chris Udry for comments, and Nathalie Gons, Tomoko Harigaya, Karen Lyons and Lauren Smith for excellent research and field assistance. We thank the National Science Foundation (SGER SES-0313877, CAREER SES-0547898), Innovations for Poverty Action, Russell Sage Foundation and the Social Science Research Council for funding. All views, opinions, and errors are our own.

Keywords

  • commitment
  • female empowerment
  • household decision making
  • microfinance
  • savings

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Geography, Planning and Development
  • Development
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Economics and Econometrics

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