Our newest publications
Blossoming Towns
By Menna Bishop, Niclas Moneke, and Céline Zipfel
Towns and cities create jobs and income. Can the arrival of new jobs also create a town? We study large agro-industrial labour demand shocks in rural sub-Saharan Africa: flower farms in Kenya. Rising production costs in Europe generate a boom in Kenyan cut-flower export production, providing stable wage jobs for mostly low-skilled women. We...
Beyond access: What has Ghana’s education expansion delivered?
New evidence on opportunity, work, gender and wellbeing
By Nicola Branson, Emma Whitelaw, Kwawu Joana Deladem, and Betty Baabo Adzah
At the same time as Africa’s youth population is growing, governments across the continent are increasingly shifting policy focus to participation in secondary education to meet SDG 4. Ghana has already dramatically expanded access to secondary education, first through free, compulsory lower junior high in 1996 and, since 2017, free senior high school. This...
Childcare Subsidies as Employment Policy for the Urban Poor
Evidence from a Voucher Experiment in Addis Ababa
By Biniam Bedasso, Ermias Weldesenbet, and Kehinde Ajayi
Affordable childcare is a central constraint on women’s economic participation and household welfare in Addis Ababa, particularly among low-income households and refugees. This project evaluates a demand-side childcare subsidy through an individual-level randomised controlled trial of 1,240 low-income mothers, including host-community and refugee households. Eligible women were offered a digital voucher redeemable at a...
Income Growth and Women’s Work
Long-Run Evidence from India
By Angelica Bozzi , Rebecca Cai , and Sam Asher
This paper asks whether rising rural incomes are driving some of India’s falling female labor force participation. Identification comes from India’s vast network of gravity-driven irrigation canals, which generate exogenous variation in agricultural productivity by distributing water only to nearby lower-elevation villages. We find that canal treatment reduces the employment share in agriculture for...
Litigant Rights Reform on Women’s Empowerment
Evidence from Nigeria
By Oluwabunmi Adejumo
This paper examines the impact of the 2000 Sharia law resurgence in northern Nigeria on women’s educational attainment and labour market outcomes. Using data from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (2003-2024) and a difference-in-differences approach, I estimate the effect of the reform on women exposed during school age. With significant declines in the...
