Women and cash transfers
A systematic review of the literature on the impact of cash transfers on women’s employment and empowerment.
Abstract
In this paper, the authors conduct a systematic review of the literature on the impact of cash transfers on women’s employment and empowerment. They construct a dataset of 265 impacts of cash transfers on adult women across 56 studies and 30 programs in lower and middle income countries. The dataset is the first that matches estimated treatment effects with harmonised information on the design of cash transfer programs, including the transfer size, payment methods and frequencies and program conditionality’s. Across studies they find that cash transfers have a positive and insignificant impact on women’s employment and empowerment. They use their data to explore how the impact of cash transfers differs by program design features and baseline country conditions, including local labour market structures and gender social norms. They find that cash transfers have a larger impact on women’s labour force participation when they are larger in size, and when there is a higher proportion of women who work in formal employment before the program evaluation. Overall, the results suggest that cash transfers have more meaningful impacts on women’s employment and empowerment when pre-existing gender constraints are low. The findings highlight the importance of interpreting estimated program impacts in the context of country level conditions and program design.
This is part of the Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low Income Countries programme.
Citation
Diaz-Pardo, G and Rao, M. ‘Women and Cash Transfers’ Synthesis Paper No. 13, Gender Growth and Labour Markets in Low Income Countries 2024