We examine whether gender quotas introduced by development agencies empower women. As part of a development program, an international organization created community management committees in 661 villages to oversee village level program expenditures. In a randomly selected half of these villages...

Can development aid empower women? We randomly assigned 1,250 Congolese communities to a development program that distributed development funds and included women in project selection and implementation, with the goal of empowering women. In 2010 and 2011, we revisited 816 treatment and control...