Browsing by Author "Kumar, Neha"

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Does Social Capital Build Women’s Assets? The Long-Term Impacts of Group–Based and Individual Dissemination of Agricultural Technology in Bangladesh
(2010) Kumar, Neha; Quisumbing, Agnes R.
"This paper investigates the long–term impact of agricultural technologies, disseminated using different implementation modalities, on men’s and women’s asset accumulation in rural Bangladesh. Data were collected in 1996-97 to examine the effects of the adoption of new vegetable varieties and polyculture fishpond management technologies on household resource allocation, incomes, and nutrition, and a followup survey was conducted ten years later. We make three types of comparisons using nearest neighbor matching, comparing (1) early and late adopters of the technology; (2) NGO members with access to the technology and those without access to the technology; and (3) NGO members vs. non–NGO members. Our results suggest that implementation modalities are important in determining the impact of new technologies on men’s and women’s asset accumulation. Women’s assets increase more relative to men’s when technologies are disseminated through women’s groups. These findings are robust to controls for unobserved household-level characteristics. These results suggest that social capital, as embodied through women’s groups, not only serves as a substitute for physical assets in the short run, but helps to build up women’s asset portfolios in the long run."
Policy Reform toward Gender Equality in Ethiopia: Little by Little the Egg Begins to Walk
(2012) Kumar, Neha; Quisumbing, Agnes R.
"There is growing interest in the role of policy reforms to promote gender equality and empower women, two key objectives of development policy. From a policy perspective, it would be ideal for reforms undertaken in different policy areas to be consistent, so that they reinforce each other in improving gender equity. We use data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS) to show how two seemingly unrelated reforms-community-based land registration, undertaken since 2003, and changes in the Family Code implemented in 2000-may have created conditions for mutually reinforcing gender-sensitive reforms. Our analysis confirms previous studies' findings of gender gaps in awareness and information about the land registration process. Male-headed households are, on average, more likely to have heard about the process, to have attended meetings (and a greater number of meetings), and to have received some written material with information about the process. Having female members in the Land Administration Committee (LAC) has a positive impact on attendance at meetings relating to land registration. In our analysis of the changes in the family law, we find that awareness about the land registration process is positively correlated with the shift in perceptions toward equal division of land and livestock upon divorce. The presence of female members in the LAC also has a positive effect on the shift in perceptions toward a more equal division of assets upon divorce. Taken together, these findings suggest that the land registration process and the reform of the Family Code may have mutually reinforcing effects on women's rights and welfare. While this example is obviously rooted in the Ethiopian context, it raises the possibility that similar reform efforts may be complementary in other countries as well."