Women’s Action Committees and Local Services in Malawi ...

As part of a coordinated set of field experiments across five countries (EGAP’s Metaketa V), we will implement a field experiment on women’s collective efficacy and political engagement in Malawi. Our intervention will randomize trainings to women’s village savings and loan associations (VSLA). At the group level, those in the treatment will attend facilitated sessions designed to engender a sense of gender-based collective efficacy. At the individual level, we will randomly incentivize new members to join existing VSLAs. This will allow us to test whether participating in a women’s VLSA alone increases women’s political participation and whether participating in trainings meant to foster collective efficacy offers an additional benefit. We will evaluate the effect of both the individual and group-level treatments on women’s political interest and engagement around local public goods and services provision. ...