G²LM|LIC

A field experiment in Bangladesh provides informal firms information on occupational health and safety (OHS). A sub-treatment arm provides firms with financial linkages to address credit constraints. Two years after the intervention, treated firms are more likely to invest in health and safety measures and firm owners and workers have increased health and safety knowledge. Treated firms are also more likely to hire new apprentices and more experienced skilled workers and foremen. However, we find no effect on profit. We find no additional effect due to financial linkages, suggesting that addressing the information gap is key to improving OHS.

Export manufacturing in low income countries has been devastated by COVID-19. Female workers are likely to be particularly affected, given that they may be in more precarious positions within and lack information about their legal rights and eligibility for the government stimulus and other relief programs. This proposal develops and implements a mobile-phone based survey of garment workers in Bangladesh, to provide insights about COVID-19 responses in their workplace and the effects on workers by gender. We recruit the sample by beginning with two samples of garment workers employed in past research by the PI’s and BIGD and ask for referrals from these workers, employing statistical techniques to reweigh the sample to achieve representativeness. We find that, while garment sector workers experience layoffs, garment work appears to be superior to alternatives, at least during a pandemic. Employers’ adoption of COVID-19 prevention practices is negatively correlated with workers’ experience of COVID-19, even controlling for workers’ personal characteristics.

To curb the spread of COVID-19, Uganda implemented one of Africa’s strictest lockdowns. With all educational institutions entirely shut down for seven months, students, and in particular, those attending boarding schools, found their daily lives in total disarray. In this policy brief, we use data from a phone survey with 811 students enrolled in the National Certificate Course at five Vocational Training Institutes (VTIs) across central and eastern Uganda. 60% of the students in the sample are male, and the average student is 20 years old. In 2020 school closures impacted around 250 million students in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNICEF 2021). Our survey was conducted in June 2020, three months into the Ugandan school closure, to contribute evidence toward understanding how the pandemic affected students’ learning environments, mental health and time use in the very short run. This study is a spin-off of the Meet Your Future Project, an ongoing RCT designed to investigate the relative importance of several barriers to quality employment that students face when transitioning from the educational sector into labor markets characterized by high levels of informality. Evidence on medium and long run effects of the school closure will be available in the near future.

Despite rising educational attainment, female labor force participation (FLFP) has declined in Egypt; in 2018, only 17% of women were employed (Krafft, Assaad, and Keo 2019). There are three main explanations as to why FLFP globally and in Egypt remains low: women’s high opportunity cost of time (determined by childcare responsibilities), weak labor demand and restrictive gender norms. The Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in collaboration with IZA will evaluate the impact of access to nurseries on FLFP using a randomized control trial. The evaluation was designed to investigate whether the cost of childcare discourages female employment and how this interacts with two other potential barriers to female employment: limited access to jobs and restrictive gender norms. Women with young children are doubly challenged by the pandemic. Disproportionately responsible for caregiving, yet faced with the loss of child care options in light of the pandemic and lockdowns, they will face particular difficulties in retaining or gaining work and may face increased stress and pressures within the household. Our plan is to ask a number of questions on the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to assess the gendered impact of the pandemic on households as well as policy responses.