Month: December 2022

IPA and BIGD Sign MoU for Creating Greater Impact of Development Research in Bangladesh

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UN Women Asia and Pacific, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), creating a collaboration to use high-quality research to support evidence-informed development solutions in Bangladesh.

IPA is a global research and policy organisation with a presence in 20 countries across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. IPA works with partners to generate and use rigorous evidence to guide smarter development investments and ultimately improve the lives of millions of people living in poverty. Over the past 20 years, IPA has conducted over 900 studies in 50 countries to identify what works, what doesn’t, and why.

BIGD, a Bangladesh-based social science academic and research institute of BRAC University, does a range of research work—from large-scale impact evaluation to deep qualitative inquiry to formative research—on important issues around development and governance. It combines the academic excellence and independence of a university with unique access to BRAC, one of the leading global social innovation platforms, to do high-quality, relevant development research.

The organisations’ complementary strengths will have a catalytic impact in Bangladesh. IPA’s strong technical capabilities around evaluation and its global network of researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and funders will complement BIGD’s intimate knowledge of research in Bangladesh, its unique relationship with BRAC, and its ability to attract Bangladeshi researchers. It is expected that the collaboration will strengthen BIGD’s technical capacities and attract global researchers and funding for research and policy work in Bangladesh.

IPA and BIGD will jointly design research initiatives, raise resources, and pursue an institutional strengthening program for BIGD through exchanges with IPA staff globally and partner universities. BIGD will offer IPA and its researcher network meaningful partnership opportunities for rigorous and more context-driven development research in Bangladesh.

The two organisations will also explore fundraising opportunities for new research initiatives in areas of common interest to better attract researchers from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).  The organisations believe that these initiatives will increase and improve       locally relevant development research agendas.

IPA and BIGD are considering setting up a team within BIGD to provide advisory services and capacity exchange on monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) in collaboration with IPA’s Right Fit Evidence unit, which is dedicated to developing resources and offering services to help funders and implementers make learning-oriented monitoring and evaluation a reality. Bangladesh has a thriving ecosystem of development innovations, both within the government and nonprofits. Yet MEL practices in the country often fail to support learning and improvement, which can limit effective scaleups. IPA’s technical expertise, combined with BIGD’s grounding in the Bangladesh context, will help to address this shortcoming. The new collaboration will also accelerate dissemination and policy outreach activities, both within and outside Bangladesh.

Dr Imran Matin, executive director of BIGD, said: “BIGD and IPA share the basic belief that good evidence matters in developing effective, scalable solutions. Bangladesh is a rich country of social innovations that can be useful globally. We hope to join forces to empower social innovators with high-quality evidence to create global public goods. I am super excited about this ambition.“

IPA Executive Director Annie Duflo stated, “Our partnership with BIGD will further our mission by strengthening the capacity of, and partnering with, a strong local organisation to conduct high-quality research and cultivate deep, long-lasting relationships needed to effectively engage with decision-makers to support evidence uptake and ultimately to improve the lives of people living in poverty.”

With millions of dollars invested in poverty reduction in Bangladesh, the stakes for funding what works to improve lives are significant. International research organisations have made some progress in ensuring that high-quality evidence is moving beyond mere publication and into the hands of policymakers. The collaboration of IPA and BIGD in Bangladesh will further this process, generating evidence, disseminating learning, and ultimately benefiting Bangladesh.

Combatting Child Marriage in the Dalit Community

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“Dalit” originates from the Sanskrit word दलित (dalita), meaning “divided, split, broken, scattered”, it was originally used in the 1800s to describe the lower castes (untouchables) of the Hindu society. In Bangladesh, it is used to identify an outcast minority of oppressed, exploited, and deprived people based on both religious and socio-economic differences. About 3.5 million Dalits live in Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, the Dalit community is not only a caste-based community but rather a population marginalized by both religious sanctions and economic deprivations. This puts the community in a position of double-discrimination, due to both their caste and religion and also due to their occupation and financial scarcity from another. Within the community, the adolescent girls are further marginalized by virtue of their age and gender, rendering them further voiceless. As part of the Sustaining Power: Women’s Struggles against Contemporary Backlash in South Asia (SuPWR) project, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) is looking at the movement against child marriage. In collaboration Girls not Brides Coalition Bangladesh, along with Dalit – Hope for the Oppressed, an organization working to empower the Dalit community in Southeast Bangladesh, data was collected from Dalit community members living in the Khulna City Corporation.

As part of the study, two FGDs were carried out, one with members of the community and another with the NGO staff. We discussed the causes of child marriage in the Dalit community as we wanted to understand the specificities of this community. The participants were asked to discuss the strategies Dalit took in the movement for stopping child marriage and the effectiveness of their strategies. It was interesting to see the similarities and differences in what they consider to be effective strategies, and the different criteria they think are important to even consider a strategy to be effective.

While discussing the causes of child marriage, a range of vulnerabilities came forward which is impacting the entire community. The children have high dropout rates, and their economic condition often forces them out of school. The nearest government school is also sometimes quite far. The lack of access to justice due to discrimination from nearby service providers also compounds the fear of their daughters’ physical safety. Under all these considerations, the parents marry off their daughters at a very young age. This has led to the common saying “kuri te buri”, meaning that at 20 years of age you’re elderly, far too old to be married. Men’s families specifically look for a bride who does not yet have a NID (usually received at 18 years of age). Like adolescents across the country, there is a notable lack of SRHR knowledge and awareness of family planning services. Although the Dalit stipend incentivises parents and tries to send children, especially Dalit girls to school. Dalit NGO also offers pre-schooling support for a mixed-age group in makeshift learning centres.

Activists face different forms of backlash when working in the community to stop child marriage incidents. The most notable is the threat of expulsion from the community, and are immediately labelled a traitor to their own community if any external complaint is made. The participants mentioned a story where a school teacher tried to stop child marriage of a Dalit girl. As a result, the entire community turned against the teacher and was eventually forced to leave the area. They also regularly face the threat of physical violence. Although public representatives personally believe this is a movement worth supporting, they are hesitant to coordinate with activists in any public setting. Rather they would prefer to keep their names entirely out of any such efforts out of fear of losing votes. If a girl herself stands up to her own marriage and manages to convince her parents, the entire family gets subjected to social stigma.

When it came to strategies, both parties felt that increasing the overall schooling of adolescents, along with specific conversations with them and their families about the risks of child marriage are extremely successful strategies. Both the NGO and community members emphasised on completion of HSC as a sign of success when it comes to stopping child marriage, along with an increase in the girls’ ability to express opinions and actively participate in household decision-making. They also referred to the financial independence of the girls or income generation as relevant criteria.

The community preferred the courtyard meeting approach with families present, while NGOs mentioned their SRHR training sessions with the adolescents as another strategy to stop child marriage. The community mentioned involving neighbours and ward councillors to stop child marriage to be quite an effective strategy too. On the other hand, calling 999 was said to be extremely ineffective. NGOs also put legal discussions of the CMRA (Child Marriage Restraint Act) 2017 as the least effective strategy. While the NGOs spoke of proper implementation of laws around child marriage, this conversation was mostly missing during the community FGD. Rather, they focused on issues within the community such as a decrease in maternal and neonatal mortality and a decrease in domestic violence and divorce rate.

Minority communities have their own intersection of vulnerabilities, which must be addressed in highly specific and contextualized ways. By reviewing the differences in NGO and community approaches, we see that there is scope to further modify combat efforts to make them more acceptable and comfortable to the intended beneficiaries.

Shravasti Roy Nath and Nuha Annoor Pabony are Research Associates at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University. 

After the Subsidies End: Pastoralist Women & the Demand for Insurance

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Photo: Women study the family framing insurance booklet near Isiolo, Kenya

In a prior post, we reported on the substantial impacts that the BOMA Project’s Rural Entrepreneur Access Project had on the assets, income, and well-being of women and their families in Kenya’s arid pastoralist regions. Unfortunately, those hard-earned gains are under constant threat from the increasingly frequent droughts that sweep through the regions, destroying as much as 50% of total household wealth in the span of a few months. Thus, sustainably empowering women would require building and protecting women’s assets.

Women are well aware of their exposure to drought risk and its impact on them and their families. During an informal conversation with the research team, one woman reported,

“When there is drought, our children fall out of trees, break their legs, and require medical care.” Believing that something had gotten lost in translation, we asked for further clarification, which the woman patiently gave. In her area, the last vegetation animals can consume when all others have been destroyed are the upper leaves of a local tree species. Tree-climbing, therefore, becomes part of a family survival strategy, albeit one with collateral damage to children.

Previously, we reported on developing a strategy whereby an available index-based livestock insurance (or takaful) contract (IBLT) could be made relevant and available to women. IBLT issues payouts based on the forage conditions in the open rangeland where the insured party usually grazes their animals1. 

Unfortunately, this kind of transhumant, open rangeland grazing is socially defined in northern Kenya as an exclusively male activity.  This strict gender-typing, along with the fact that insurance has been sold exclusively in male-oriented cattle units, raises the question as to whether livestock insurance resonates with women and their immediate concerns and responsibilities.  In our earlier work, we used a tablet-based game to remind women of their indirect exposure to rangeland risk.  This alternative framing of insurance doubled women’s demand for livestock insurance in our experimental game.

But would the same strategy work in the real world, with women’s hard-earned money at stake?

Working with our insurance partner, Takaful Insurance Africa, we developed a variant of livestock insurance called IBLT for Families.  This insurance was sold in family units of coverage, where one unit was designed to cover the basic needs of a single family member during a drought spell. We also developed educational materials to explain the novel IBLT for Families concept to potential users. 

To evaluate the effectiveness of this novel product, we randomly divided the communities in the BOMA REAP program’s ongoing impact evaluation into two groups. One group received the conventional IBLT messaging (“protect your livestock”), while the other received the novel “protect your family” framing. This novel framing was first offered to communities during the August – September 2021 IBLT sales window and then again in the January – February 2022 sales window2.

Notably, the secondary sales window was the first in which IBLT was offered without any of the subsidies that had been used as part of the broader impact evaluation research design. These subsidies were randomly distributed to study households as an incentive to boost engagement and experimentation with the insurance. The withdrawal of all subsidies prior to the January – February 2022 sales allows us to study the impact of the family framing and its interaction with the prior provision of learning subsidies.

The impact evaluation study covers 1,710 women in Samburu country in Northern Kenya. Six hundred fifty women had fully graduated from the REAP program by the early 2022 sales window. The remaining women included women eligible for REAP but who were never offered the REAP program (717) and slightly better-off women who were not eligible for REAP based on the program’s means test (343). All three groups of women were equally eligible for insurance discount coupons in the years preceding 2022.

Using data on insurance purchases by these 1,710 women and their families3, we can evaluate the impact of the family framing and the insurance coupons. Figure 1 shows the results of this analysis.

Figure 1. Insurance purchase rates and amounts paid by sales window and framing treatment

Both graphs have a similar structure. The last two sets of bars (2021-2 and 2022-1) display the impacts following the introduction of the family framing to half of the sample population. Different bars report purchases on those offered subsidies in the seasons before the primary season of 2022 (2022-1 in the figure). Note that no one had a subsidy for purchases in the 2022-1 season. However, as we can see, the difference between those who had subsidies before the 2022-1 season and those who never had subsidies is striking.

The left graph shows that almost no one purchased insurance in that last season unless they had previously received a subsidy. In the earlier seasons when subsidies were active, the only buyers were those with subsidy coupons. The econometric results indicate that past receipt of a subsidy increases the probability of buying insurance from zero to a statistically significant 19%. While other work is investigating the impact of subsidy receipt on understanding IBLT, this finding suggests that the learning effects of the subsidy were substantial. Ultimately, those with coupons experimented with the insurance, learned its value, and purchased it even when they had to pay the full market cost.

Both graphs have a similar structure. The last two sets of bars (2021-2 and 2022-1) display the impacts following the introduction of the family framing to half of the sample population. Different bars report purchases on those offered subsidies in the seasons before the primary season of 2022 (2022-1 in the figure). Note that no one had a subsidy for purchases in the 2022-1 season. However, as we can see, the difference between those who had subsidies before the 2022-1 season and those who never had subsidies is striking.

The left graph shows that almost no one purchased insurance in that last season unless they had previously received a subsidy. In the earlier seasons when subsidies were active, the only buyers were those with subsidy coupons. The econometric results indicate that past receipt of a subsidy increases the probability of buying insurance from zero to a statistically significant 19%. While other work is investigating the impact of subsidy receipt on understanding IBLT, this finding suggests that the learning effects of the subsidy were substantial. Ultimately, those with coupons experimented with the insurance, learned its value, and purchased it even when they had to pay the full market cost.

The graph on the right of Figure 1 draws this out further. This graph indicates how much of their own money families spent purchasing IBLT. As can be seen, during the subsidy periods before the 2022-1 season, families spent very little money on insurance, with the bulk of the premium paid by subsidy coupons. After subsidies were eliminated, those who had paid for their insurance in the past using coupons spent an additional 1000 and 1500 Kenyan Shillings each ($10-$15 using the market exchange rate, or about $20-$30 using purchasing power parity adjusted exchange rates).  This difference with the group that did not receive subsidy coupons is again statistically significant.

Finally, and most interestingly, we see that the family framing has a very strong interaction effect with the subsidy coupons. By itself (without past receipt of a subsidy coupon), family framing had no impact on insurance demand. However, when family framing was combined with a past receipt of a family coupon, the probability that the family would buy insurance increased by ten percentage points, up to almost 30%. Comparing purchase probabilities between 2022-1 and 2021-1, we see that the family framing kept insurance demand steady after the withdrawal of the subsidy. In contrast, demand fell by a third under the conventional livestock framing, dropping from 30% to just under 20%. The right graph in Figure 1 shows that family framing induced 50% higher insurance expenditures than livestock framing.  This positive impact of family framing is statistically significant.

Given the importance of protecting assets for women’s economic health and empowerment, this field study offers an important lesson. For exotic risk-management products like insurance, some level of at least temporary subsidy appears to be necessary for any experimentation and learning about insurance to take place (Cai finds similar results in China, as do Boucher et al. in Tanzania and Mozambique). However, learning is highly complemented by efforts, like the family insurance framing, that makes insurance relevant to rural women’s needs. Putting the two together offers a promising way forward to empower women sustainably.

References

Boucher, S., Carter, M.R., Flatnes, J.E., Lybbert, T., Malacarne, J., Marenya, P., & Paul, L. (2022). Bundling Genetic and Financial Technologies for More Resilient and Productive Small-scale Agriculture. NBER Working Paper no. w29234 (revised). https://www.nber.org/papers/w29234 

Cai, J., de Janvry, A., & Sadoulet, E. (2020). Subsidy Policies and Insurance Demand. American Economic Review, 110(8), 2422–2453. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190661 

Chantarat, S., Mude, A., Barrett, C. B., & Carter, M.R., (2013). Designing Index Based Livestock Insurance for Managing Asset Risk in Northern Kenya. Journal of Risk and Insurance, 80(1), 206-237.

  1.  The IBLT contract issues payments based on a satellite-based picture of rangeland “greenness.”  When the rangeland is less green than normal, it signals deficient forage for animals.  Past research has shown that these satellite pictures can be used to accurately predict livestock losses (see Chantarat et al., 2013).
  2. There are two IBLT sales windows per year. The primary sales window lasts from January through February and the secondary window from August to September. When referencing each sales window, we use the year followed by the number 1 or 2 to identify which window, primary or secondary. Examples: (2021-2), (2022-1).
  3.  It is impossible to determine whether the man or the woman in a household purchased insurance.

By Michael Carter & Julian Arteaga (University of California, Davis), Andrew Hobbs (University of San Francisco), Nathan Jenson (International Livestock Research Institute), and Sam Owilly (The BOMA Project)