Women’s education through empowerment: Evidence from a community-based program

Poor educational outcomes for women can adversely impact economic and social outcomes. Gender-based education disparity, often attributed to social norms, led to the development of a unique program, the Mahila Samakhya (MS), in India. This program aimed to develop women’s agency and voice to help them negotiate unequal gender norms. We explore the long-term impacts of MS on educational outcomes in India using the program’s phased rollout to address potential endogeneity concerns in several ways. We use the program’s implementation design to control for the pattern of expansion, district and birth year fixed effects to account for unobserved heterogeneity, and a triple difference estimator to capture the faster rise in educational outcomes of women than men on account of the MS program. Our estimates suggest that women who were 0–6 years of age at the time of MS rollout saw the largest gains over men of similar ages by 1.18 additional years. An important policy implication from our work is that broad-based empowerment programs can address gender disparities even within the context of large national programs with decentralized governance and implementation.