The Economic Lives of Young Women in the Time of Ebola : Lessons from an Empowerment Program
This paper evaluates an intervention to raise young women's economic empowerment in Sierra Leone, where women frequently experience sexual violence and face multiple economic disadvantages. The intervention provides them with a protective spac...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/452451551361923106/The-Economic-Lives-of-Young-Women-in-the-Time-of-Ebola-Lessons-from-an-Empowerment-Program http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31337 |
| Summary: | This paper evaluates an intervention to
raise young women's economic empowerment in Sierra
Leone, where women frequently experience sexual violence and
face multiple economic disadvantages. The intervention
provides them with a protective space (a club) where they
can find support, receive information on health and
reproductive issues, and vocational training. Unexpectedly,
the post-baseline period coincided with the 2014 Ebola
outbreak. The analysis leverages quasi-random across-village
variation in the severity of Ebola-related disruption, and
random assignment of villages to the intervention to
document the impact of the Ebola outbreak on the economic
lives of 4,700 women tracked over the crisis, and any
ameliorating role played by the intervention. In highly
disrupted control villages, the crisis leads younger girls
to spend significantly more time with men, out-of-wedlock
pregnancies rise, and as a result, they experience a
persistent 16 percentage points drop in school enrolment
post-crisis. These adverse effects are almost entirely
reversed in treated villages because the intervention
enables young girls to allocate time away from men,
preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and enabling them to
re-enrol in school post-crisis. In treated villages, the
unavailability of young women leads some older girls to use
transactional sex as a coping strategy. The intervention
causes them to increase contraceptive use so this does not
translate into higher fertility. The analysis pinpoints the
mechanisms through which the severity of the aggregate shock
impacts the economic lives of young women and shows how
interventions in times of crisis can interlink outcomes
across younger and older cohorts. |
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