Baseline Survey for the Impact Evaluation of the UN Joint Program Rural Women Economic Empowerment in Ethiopia, 2016

The UN Joint Programme focused on Rural Women’s Economic Empowerment (UNJP-RWEE) was launched in Ethiopia in 2014 by UN Women, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD). UNJP-RWEE was a five-year-long initiative to accelerate the economic empowerment of rural women in the regions of Oromia and Afar. The project provided women with greater access to credit through women-run rural savings and credit cooperatives (RUSACCOs), as well as numeracy, literacy, finance, and business-development training; agricultural livestock and technology transfers; agricultural training; and community-run educational conversations in healthy eating choices and nutrition. To assess the extent to which the UNJP was effective in empowering women economically, an impact evaluation was conducted by the FAO in partnership with IFAD, and IFPRI. The FAO received a grant from GAAP2-IFPRI, facilitated by the Gates Foundation, to conduct a quasi-experimental impact evaluation with a difference-in-difference approach using a revised version of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), the Pro-WEAI. The baseline survey was conducted between December 26th, 2016, and February 1st, 2017. The sample for beneficiaries was randomly drawn from RUSSACO members in the beneficiary communities at baseline. The decision to sample from the beneficiary households rather than from the whole village was to ensure that the sample included enough program participants. The comparison kebeles were communities in which the UNJP-RWEE did not operate but that are similar in size; have similar agricultural systems, livelihoods; and cultural norms, and thus are deemed valid counterfactuals. The baseline survey was administered to 750 households. In the beneficiary communities, 390 women were interviewed, while 360 women were interviewed in the comparison communities. Within the same households, a male respondent, typically the spouse, was also interviewed when possible. In all, 312 men in the beneficiary community and 318 men in the comparison communities were interviewed at baseline.