evaluation. The paper defines spillover effects and discusses why it is important to measure them. It explains how to design a … such that they explain the cause of these effects and whom they affect. Such an evaluation design is necessary to avoid …

For more than 20 years, the development community has claimed that monitoring and evaluation helps projects achieve … suggested link between the quality of monitoring and evaluation and project performance. The propensity score matching results … indicate that the quality of monitoring and evaluation is significantly and positively associated with project outcome as …

This study examines whether political empowerment of women affects their economic participation. In the context of … mandated political representation reform for women in India, the study finds that the length of exposure to women politicians … representation of women directly affects hours of work assigned to women under the recent national public works program, the Mahatma …

ability of a spouse to deny permission for the other to work outside the home, and raising women's minimum age of marriage …. Thus both access to resources and the removal of restrictions on employment served to strengthen women's bargaining … of the reform's impact. The analysis finds that women were relatively more likely to work in occupations that require …

Improving women's agency, namely their ability to define goals and act on them, is crucial for advancing gender … equality and the empowerment of women. Yet, existing frameworks for women's agency measurement -- both disorganized and partial … -- provide a fragmented understanding of the constraints women face in exercising their agency, restricting the design of quality …

economists, primarily involving impact evaluation, has measured empowerment as women's influence over household expenditures …The concept of empowerment is now widely used in several disciplines to characterize the states and social processes of … individuals and communities. In economic development, the concept has come to mean women's power and agency in all economic …

undertakes a talk-centered analysis of the gram sabha with a focus on examining the oral participation of women in general and … women affiliated with microcredit self-help groups who have access to an associational life. The qualitative analysis of 255 … gram sabha transcripts from four South Indian states finds that women associated with microcredit self-help groups employ a …

A review of rigorous evaluations of interventions that seek to empower women economically shows that the same class of … sufficient to grow women-owned subsistence-level firms. However, it can work if it is delivered in-kind to more successful women … microentrepreneurs, and it should boost the performance of women's larger-sized SMEs. Very poor women need a more intensive package of …

The paper explores whether one of the largest programs in the world for women's empowerment and rural livelihoods, the … loans, which allowed them to accumulate some assets (livestock and durables for the poorest and nonfarm assets for the poor …), invest in education, and increase total expenditures (for the poorest and poor). Women who participated in the program had …

This paper uses primary data from rural north India to show that participation in a community-level female empowerment … support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training for rural women in several states of India … disentangle the program's mechanisms, separately considering its effect on women who work, and those who do not work but whose …