Extreme poverty, displacement and

female empowerment:

Evidence from an impact evaluation

of Red UNIDOS in Colombia

Susana Martínez-Restrepo, PhD.

Fedesarrollo

Juan Camilo Mejía

Fedesarrollo and Los Andes University

Erika Enríquez

Fedesarrollo

Motivation and Background

Extreme poverty and

displacement in Colombia

Currently, 30.6% of Colombia’s population lives under

the poverty line and 9.1% under extreme poverty

Extreme poverty is always higher in rural areas (19.1%)

vs. 6% in medium and large cities. Women represent

31% of the extreme poor in cities while men, 28.8%.

While labor force participation in urban areas is 57.8%

among women, it is 74.5% among men.

By 2012 it was estimated that there were 3,943,500

individuals displaced by violence, which is about 8% of

Colombia’s population.

People living in extreme poverty and those displaced by violence to urban areas frequently have multiple needs:

1. Psychological

2. Social

3. Economic

4. Empowerment (to take action to make the necessary changes in their lives)

Requires a wide range of coordinated services from multiple areas (education, health, identification, income generation) and support from many fronts (service supply, preferential service access, and psychosocial support).

Recent wave of ambitious programmes aimed at alleviating extreme poverty in Latin

America

Middle income countries (extreme poverty ~ 15% in Colombia, ~ 10% in Brazil, ~

5% in Chile)

Beyond CCT

Beneficiaries hard to reach

Chile Solidario (Chile)

Introduced in 2002

Includes (small) CCT element, preferential access to public services and 5-year

socio-pyschological support

Quasi-experimental evaluation using administrative and survey data

Carneiro, Galasso, Ginja 2009; Amior, Carneiro, Galasso and Ginja 2011

Positive effects on employment, and take up of subsidies and employment

programmes

Heterogeneous impacts (rural vs urban, gender of head of household,

municaplity, social workers)

Brasil sem Miseria (Brasil): Introduced in December 2011

Unidos (Colombia): Introduced in 2007, modelled after Chile Solidario

2. Red UNIDOS Strategy

Large scale and very ambitious program to target the hardest to reach households

Objective is achieved through a three-arm strategy

1. Intensive period of psychosocial support up to 5 years, provided by trained social workers (to enable self-development and function as part of society)

2. Social services – promoting preferential treatment and improving the supply (quantity and quality)

3. Improving institutional capacity of local governments

• Eligibility : poorest 1.5 million households as of March 2008:

– SISBEN 1 families – maximum of 1.2 million households

– Displaced households (Registro Único de Población Desplazada) – 300,000 households

• First introduced in 2007 – pilot in 37 municipalities

• As of May 2012: serving majority of targeted families

• 5 million people

• 45% in rural areas

• 94% of municipalities

• 10,000 social workers

Households objectives – reach some minimum conditions necessary to

overcome extreme poverty

45 ‘logros basicos‘

9 dimensions

1. Identification

2. Income and work

3. Education and training

4. Health

5. Nutrition

6. Housing conditions

7. Family dynamic

8. Banking and savings

9. Access to justice

3. Literature review

Typically, the variables that have been used across contexts to measure empowerment have been education, employment, and participation in community programs. Employment allows women to earn an income, with a resulting positive impact on the social standing of women within the household and in society (Sen, 1999, p. 191).

According to Agarwal (1997), what determines the equality or inequality of bargaining power is the fallback position of individuals. In the context of intra-household bargaining, an individual’s fallback position is largely determined by access to economic assets, which is directly tied to the capability of being able to survive outside of the household (Sen, 1981).

Molyneux defines women’s empowerment as acquiring capabilities with the goal of assisting women in achieving autonomy (legal and material), equality (social and personal, i.e., status and self-esteem), as well as voice and influence over decisions that affect their lives (Molyneux, 2008).

Employment allows women to earn an income, with a resulting positive impact on the social standing of women within the household and in society (Sen, 1999, p. 191).

In terms of education, there is evidence that access to education improves women’s capacity to question, to reflect on, and to gain access to information and make changes in their lives (Kabeer, 2005, p. 16).

4. Research Questions

1. What is the impact of Red UNIDOS on

Women empowerment measured as labor

market participation, intra-household

bargaining and decision making,

community leadership?

2. What factors also matter for that

decision? Childcare, street violence,

transportation, job quality (formal vs.

informal jobs).

5. Methods

Experimental design

77 municipalities (representative of the entire country)

Cluster randomization: each municipality divided into several neighborhoods (clusters)

Cohorts: Neighbourhoods are randomly allocated to four groups (1 – 4)

Treatment commences at different times for each cohort

More than one year elapses between cohort 1 and 4

Cohort 1 = treatment, Cohort 4 = control.

Randomisation should ensure balance of characteristics.

Treatment group further subdivided between ‘classic’ and ‘intense’

Intense treatment group receives more visits (lower caseloads for social workers)

Social worker randomly assigned to neighbourhood, then randomly assigned to type of

treatment

Incomplete take-up/contaminated controls:

– ~30% (11%) of households randomly assigned to treatment group had received no official (self-reported) visits at follow-up

– ~0% (70%) control received official (self-reported) visits at follow-up

– Under certain assumptions recover ITT using IV: real treatment is instrumented using random assignment

– Original treatment group received 2 (3) official (self-reported) visits on average at follow-up (not enough to get an impact) Likely to find no effect at all

Evaluation design

Our data contains a treatment group of 3972 households and 5382 individuals and a control group of 1946 household and 2719 individuals in 77 municipalities.

The total sample size used for the analysis was 5918 households and 8101 individuals.

The baseline was collected, and the follow-up at the end of 2009 and beginnings of 2011.

Due to project implementation challenges that contaminated the control group (visits received from the CogestoresSociales), for this we use Instrumental Variables Techniques as the main identification model. In order to address this selectivity problem and unobserved variable bias, the literature suggests the use of the instrumental variable approach should enable the assumptions of exogenous variation in the treatment (Murnane & Willett, 2010).

The model implemented takes the following form:

Where yiht Is the result variable for the individual i in the household h in period t, Tht Is the indicator of the treatment, it is one if the household reported more than two visits from the cogestor, Xiht' is a vector of exogenous covariates in an individual level for period t, and zht_1' is a vector of covariates in a household level for the period t-1. Our interest is concentrated in β1.

There was contamination in Tht, the way in which we can still use this treatment is instrumenting it, using a variable that has correlation with the treatment but no relation with the outcome variable. What is going to be used is Dht, which indicates whether the household was assigned to the classic or intense treatment group. The latter has correlation with Tht and was randomly assigned so it can be used as follows:

It is important to note that there can be an important problem with this variable since people that were part of the strategy had some trouble identifying the cogestores with people from other programs such as “familias en acción”, “jóvenes en acción”, “oportunidades rurales”, etc.

In the first stage Tht is obtained and in the second stage the indicator

or achievement is modeled as a function of the exogenous

component of the real treatment and its interaction with the period.

Again, β3 would represent the impact of the strategy. At first this

element should also be instrumented in the first stage, but, the

estimated value would be t multiplied by the estimated value of T, so

they are equivalent equations, which can be estimated as one.

6. Results

(1) Quantitative

(2) Qualitative

Quantitative Outcomes

(2) Cualitative Methods

(Triadas de Amigas)

Cali and Dagua Valle/ Medellin and Angostura Antioquia and Bogota

LABOR URBAN* Positive Reduction of Job Informality

Some of women interviewed expressed that they value the

fact that on informal jobs, schedules are flexible so they can

manage their time.

Jobs in the formal sector usually have strict schedules that

are difficult to fulfill given that most of them have family

responsibilities.

They also expressed their dissatisfaction with long

workdays, income instability, low wages, and mistreat by the

employers, especially for women working as housemaids.

The unpredictable income limits their possibility to contribute

to cover household expenses

LABOR DISPLACED- No significant results

In the focus groups there were differences on women’s perceptions about the program between displaced and non-displaced population, overall in access to housing programs.

Some of women who are displaced mentioned that they received support for housing before they belonged to Red Unidos.

Usually, displaced women interviewed said they were beneficiaries from other social assistance programs different from Unidos.

Since Unidos coordinates services from multiple areas, sometimes for beneficiaries is not that clear where the assistance is coming from, they might be contacted through Unidos but the service is delivered directly by other institutions or programs

LABOR RURAL- No significant results

Women reported non having labor opportunities locally. The program limited their actions regarding income regeneration strategies to men, and to having diversified orchards to improve food security

Intra-household decision making process regarding participation in the labor market, education, health and control of resources.

Women suggested that working contributes to their independence, to strength their confidence and to improve their bargaining power in the household.

In general, women who work and are able to contribute to the household feel more autonomous and freer, because they are not economically dependent on anybody.

When having and income it is easier for them to participate in household decision-making regarding food or any other kind of things they or their children need.

Additionally, some of them expressed that they felt empowered in other dimensions since to work allows them to learn, to progress, to interact with other people and to be useful for their communities.

Programs that give women access to information about their rights and how they can defend themselves also help them to avoid domestic violence and to be more confident to denounce when they have been abused.

7. Conclusions and Policy

Implications

Red UNIDOS did not show significant impact on any of theempowerment measures used, except for informality on urbanareas for both men and women.

Issues with the design

1. Qualitative work, showed that the program has majorchallenges with income generation strategies on womenparticularly on rural areas.

2. Issues such as opportunities, education are a problem to findjobs, and these are worked by the Program.

3. Economics of Care is not included in the program, andrepresents one of the major obstacles for women’s jobparticipation: The opportunity cost created by the care ofchildren and grand children, cost and time of transportationto available jobs. The preference of most women is to havesmall -informal entrepreneurships at home.

Issues with program implementation

1. Number of Families per Cogestor Social

2. Cogestores Sociales wages, education and

experience

3. Quality of local operators (Funof, Medellin Solidario)

4. Lack of social services and job opportunities in rural

areas

* Follow up data (2011) gathered only after 18 months of

the baseline

THANKS