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Field
Abstract
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Before
Many barriers keep women from working outside of their homes in low and middle-income countries. Those barriers have stymied the shift of women’s work from home to market that would come with structural transformation. In this project, we investigate interventions that target two factors that may limit the labor force participation of women: (1) lack of time and (2) lack of suitable jobs. We will assess the role of each factor, and both together, through a randomized controlled trial. Women switching from traditional solid fuel to liquified petroleum gas (LPG) are likely to save time which may free them for market work. In turn, Increased income through market work is likely to increase the women’s ability to pay for LPG. Our cross-randomized design allows us to study this complementarity. A key aim of this research design is to determine how the entrance of women into the workforce depends on their access to timesaving technologies (such as clean and efficient fuels). We will use both primary survey and administrative data from the job provider to evaluate our intervention.
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After
Why is the adoption of efficient cooking fuels so low in LMICs, despite well-documented health and potential time-saving gains? This is puzzling for two reasons. Many countries subsidize cleaner fuels for low-income households to facilitate a switch out of firewood. Moreover, freeing women’s time spent on collecting and cooking with solid fuels can potentially raise household incomes, if women have opportunities to do more market work.
We identify two opportunities. First, despite the provision of heavy subsidies, recent research has highlighted financial constraints in the adoption of cooking fuel technology. Second, switching from firewood to clean fuels requires financial consideration often by men in the household, while women are to gain from switching away from firewood collection and cooking. Intrahousehold decision-making has important implications for energy transition, but is relatively less studied. Access to a suitable labor market can help women gain financial resources as well as realize returns from time and “energy” saved in home production.
Our core research premise is that clean fuel subsidies alone cannot lead to sustained energy transition in cooking fuel until informational and intra-household constraints are addressed. We seek to answer two main questions by experimentally evaluating a novel combination of two treatments — information on clean fuel cost and access to digital work for women. First, we assess how information on clean fuel costs and increasing women’s access to income-generating employment affect households’ transition from biomass to clean cooking fuel. Second, we seek to understand whether information on clean fuel costs and government subsidies on LPG and women’s access to income-generating employment complement each other in boosting adoption of LPG and other clean fuels. Specifically, we posit that there are strong complementariness between easing information constraints on clean fuel expenditures and women’s employment.
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