Primary Outcomes (explanation)
We construct an index for each type of empowerment (economic, psychological, personal, and relational) as some programs can improve women’s control over the household’s expenses while having no significance on their asset ownership (Schwab et al., 2020). We follow the method of Anderson (2008), which was used to construct indices of aspirations, gender, and gender behaviour attitudes in an intervention targeting adolescents in India (Dhar et al., 2022). The method was also used by Haushofer and Shapiro (2016) in Kenya to assess the impact of unconditional cash transfers, and Janzen et al. (2018) in Nepal to assess the impact of livestock transfer and training programs. The summary index that uses a Generalized Least Squares (GLS) weighting procedure has the advantage of assigning less weight to highly correlated variables and more weight to uncorrelated indicators to improve efficiency (Schwab et al., 2020). Also, the procedure uses available data and assigns lower weights to indicators with missing values to allow calculation of the index, even for observations with missing values.