The challenge
India has a striking gender gap in political participation; in Ghoda Dongri block of Madhya Pradesh, only 9% of women had ever contacted their local leader and 3% had made a claim on that leader.
The case
As of 2017, the NGO Pradan had worked for 15 years in Madhya Pradesh to mobilise rural women into self-help groups: informal savings and credit associations of 10 to 20 women from the same village, which meet frequently and give women access to networks of other women. Pradan used an arbitrary boundary to decide which villages were eligible, only those within a set radius of its field offices, so Soledad Artiz Prillaman pair-matched villages just inside and just outside that boundary, a natural experiment creating as-if random variation in access to the groups. Drawing on a 2016 survey of 5,371 women and 2,399 men in 376 villages, of which 152 matched villages were used for this comparison, and more than 200 interviews, she found that participation in the groups had a significant and substantial impact on women's political participation: women's attendance at public meetings doubled. In the 2017 working-paper version, she also reports that the intervention increased women's mobility outside the household but did not substantially improve women's empowerment in the household or reduce domestic violence.
Why it worked
Prillaman provides suggestive evidence of three mechanisms behind the effect: larger networks, more capacity for collective action within networks, and the development of civic skills.
Sources
- Prillaman, S. A. (2023). Strength in numbers: How women's groups close India's political gender gap. American Journal of Political Science, 67(2), 390–410.
- Prillaman, S. A. (October 2017). Strength in numbers: How women's networks close India's political gender gap. Working paper (J-PAL).
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