Impacts of Skilling and Employment Opportunities on Female Rural-to-Urban Migrant Workers and their Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Last registered on February 08, 2018

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Impacts of Skilling and Employment Opportunities on Female Rural-to-Urban Migrant Workers and their Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0002725
Initial registration date
February 08, 2018

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
February 08, 2018, 5:40 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
University of Michigan

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Boston College

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2017-10-01
End date
2022-06-30
Secondary IDs
Abstract
In partnership with one of the world’s largest garment manufacturers with production based in Bengaluru, India, we will conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the drivers and consequences of internal migration of women in rural India. We will randomly select locations for 10 large rural tailor training centers among 20 candidate village clusters (taluks) representing roughly 1220 villages in rural Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Once the rural tailor training facilities are established in each of the 10 randomly chosen taluks, women in nearby villages will be offered free vocational skill training in stitching. Training will occur in roughly 6-7 batches of 30 workers per center per year and trainees will be offered guaranteed employment at the partner firm in Bengaluru upon the completion of 3 months of training. Mobilization and recruitment for the training batches is mandated by the government skilling subsidy scheme to be targeted towards households with working-age females that are below the poverty line (BPL) and, when possible, represent marginalized ethnicities (scheduled castes and tribes).
We have sampled 240 villages from the 1220 villages within a 20km radius of the 20 candidate taluks, and 12 households from each of the 240 sampled villages, of which 9 in each village are targeted households most eligible for the program and 3 are non-targeted households. Sample weights allow us to recover representative measures at the village economy level, as well as for subsamples of targeted and non-targeted households. A baseline survey of these 2880 households representing roughly 2912 eligible women is currently under way. Follow up surveys will track work and welfare outcomes of these women every 6 months and household consumption, investment, and economic activities every 12 months for a period of 3 years after the baseline survey.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Adhvaryu, Achyuta and Anant Nyshadham. 2018. "Impacts of Skilling and Employment Opportunities on Female Rural-to-Urban Migrant Workers and their Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial." AEA RCT Registry. February 08. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.2725-1.0
Former Citation
Adhvaryu, Achyuta and Anant Nyshadham. 2018. "Impacts of Skilling and Employment Opportunities on Female Rural-to-Urban Migrant Workers and their Families: A Randomized Controlled Trial." AEA RCT Registry. February 08. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/2725/history/25658
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We randomly assign 10 taluks to treatment (receive a training center) and 10 taluks to control (no training centers) with no additional stratification, and balance across important demographic characteristics based on baseline survey. All women aged 18-35 with more than 5 grades of schooling and below the poverty line (BPL) are eligible to sign up for the training. However, due to the fact that candidate taluks are located far away from each other, only women who live in villages nearby a treatment taluk are likely to take up. The training lasts for 3 months and will be free of charge. After completing the training, each trainee will be offered a job at one of the factories owned by the partner firm in Bangalore. Trainees are free to accept or reject the job offers. To study how ordeal mechanisms affect targeting efficiency, we further randomize the treatment villages, stratifying by distance to taluk center, into two arms: 60 villages to a “micro-ordeal” arm where applicants are required to complete a tedious task before signing up and 60 villages to the “non-ordeal” arm where no such task is required.
Intervention Start Date
2018-04-01
Intervention End Date
2018-12-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Female labor force participation, female welfare, gender-attitudes, consumption, agricultural investment, schooling, health
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Female welfare: schooling, health, family decisions, gender attitudes, bargaining power, and subjective well-being, mobility, etc.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We will randomly select locations for 10 large rural tailor training centers among 20 candidate village clusters (taluks) representing roughly 1220 villages in rural Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Once the rural tailor training facilities are established in each of the 10 randomly chosen taluks, women in nearby villages will be offered free vocational skill training in stitching. Training will occur in roughly 6-7 batches of 30 workers per center per year and trainees will be offered guaranteed employment at the partner firm in Bengaluru upon the completion of 3 months of training. Mobilization and recruitment for the training batches is mandated by the government skilling subsidy scheme to be targeted towards households with working-age females that are below the poverty line (BPL) and, when possible, represent marginalized ethnicities (scheduled castes and tribes).
We have sampled 240 villages from the 1220 villages within a 20km radius of the 20 candidate taluks, and 12 households from each of the 240 sampled villages, of which 9 in each village are targeted households most eligible for the program and 3 are non-targeted households. Sample weights allow us to recover representative measures at the village economy level, as well as for subsamples of targeted and non-targeted households. A baseline survey of these 2880 households representing roughly 2912 eligible women is currently under way. Follow up surveys will track work and welfare outcomes of these women every 6 months and household consumption, investment, and economic activities every 12 months for a period of 3 years after the baseline survey.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization done through a statistical software on a computer.
Randomization Unit
taluk(town), village
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
20 taluks, 240 villages
Sample size: planned number of observations
2,880 households.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
We randomly assign 10 taluks to treatment (receive a training center) and 10 taluks to control (no training centers)
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
IRB Health Sciences and Behavioral Sciences (HSBS), University of Michigan
IRB Approval Date
2017-03-06
IRB Approval Number
HUM00125721

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials