Empowering women through multifaceted interventions: Long-term evidence from a double matching design

Empowering women is a policy goal that has received a lot of interest by policy-makers in the developing world in recent years, yet little is known about effective ways to promote it sustain- ably. Most existing interventions fail to address the multidimensional nature of empowerment. Using a double matching design to construct the sampling frame and to estimate causal effects, I evaluate the long-term impact of a multifaceted policy intervention designed to improve women’s empowerment in the Atlantic region in Colombia. This intervention provided information about women’s rights, soft-skills and vocational training, seed capital, and mentoring simultaneously. I find that this intervention has mixed results: improvements in incomes and other economic dimensions along with large political and social capital effects, but limited or null impacts on women’s rights knowledge and control over one’s body. Using a list experiment, I even find an increase in the likelihood of intra-household violence. The results highlight the importance of addressing women’s empowerment multidimensional nature in policy innovations designed to foster it, incorporating men in these efforts.