Engaging men in household chores and child care through mobile phone-delivered Behavior Change Communications (BCC)

This study is nested in a research project called “Her time”, focused on using cell phones to measure women’s time use in a population of poor women in Ethiopia who are participating in multifaceted graduation-from-poverty programs. We focus on the North Wollo zone, which is located in the northern part of the Amhara region, because this is where both of the NGOs with which we are partnering overlap in their implementation. The two programs are Care Ethiopia's Livelihoods for Resilience (LfR) and World Vision Ethiopia's Strengthen PSNP4 Institutions and Resilience (SPIR). Within North Wollo, both LfR and SPIR programs are implemented in partnership with an Ethiopian NGO, the Organization for Rehabilitation and Development in Amhara (ORDA).

Both LfR and SPIR facilitate the formation of Village Economic and Social Associations (VESA) groups, which then become the main infrastructure through which program interventions are delivered to beneficiaries. In order to be eligible for the programs, members must qualify for and participate in Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), a government safety net program that targets poor and vulnerable households in chronically food insecure kebeles (districts) in Ethiopia. Both LfR and SPIR deliver a multifaceted set of interventions designed to permanently raise beneficiaries above the poverty line and thus reduce their future reliance on the PSNP program.

While eligible individuals are broadly encouraged to participate in SPIR and LfR wherever they are working, they ultimately self-select into these livelihoods programs. Our sample is randomly selected from the population of eligible households who choose to participate in either of these safety net programs rather than the larger population of eligible households in the region. Using program enrollment records, we draw a random sample of VESA groups in the Meket and Wadla woredas of the North Wollo zone. To avoid affecting the outcomes observed in a separate program evaluation of the SPIR livelihoods program, we exclude from our sample the kebeles in Meket and Wadla woredas that were randomly selected to be part of that program’s concurrent program evaluation.

Following VESA level livelihoods and gender training provided to both women and their male partners, we conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) using participants of the LfR and SPIR programs. We randomly assign the men either to the treatment group or the placebo group. Subjects in the treatment group receive phone-based reinforcement of training messages designed to encourage them to participate in household chores and child care and those in the placebo group receive similar phone calls addressing an unrelated placebo topic. The treatment spans three months, with six phone calls placed on a biweekly schedule. During each call, a well-trained enumerator administers a carefully designed 5 minutes script in which he discusses gender norms with the male respondent. For the control group, an enumerator places calls at the same frequency but instead discusses a placebo topic – the man’s food consumption in the last 24 hours.

The content of the scripts was largely influenced by a successful intervention conducted by World Vision, in which men conduct in-person group discussions with the objective of making them allies in the process of empowering women. We prepared the scripts in consultation with gender experts at Care Ethiopia and World Vision Ethiopia. Each of the six scripts has clearly stated objectives: the first call aims at showing men the time women spend on housework as compared to men, the second call aims at encouraging men to be involved in childcare, and the third call aims at correcting the man’s thinking about some of the myths hindering men's involvement in household chores and child care. The fourth, fifth and sixth calls repeat the content of the first, second and third calls, respectively. The content of the scripts is presented in different formats: open ended questions on which the respondent will be reflecting on his thoughts, scenarios in which he will be imagining himself in a situation, and statements with which he will be asked to agree or disagree. Well trained enumerators conduct the phone conversations in a very smooth natural way as if they are not using a script but making sure they followed the script content to guide their conversation. By the end of each script, the respondent is asked to commit to small weekly tasks designed to encourage his participation in household chores and child care activity that he has not been performing before. On the next call, enumerators check if he has done the assignment or not. See the Appendix B for detailed content of the scripts.

2021-01-13

2022-02-28

We measure male’s participation in eight household tasks – child care, collecting fuelwood, fetching water, cooking, washing clothes, processing grains, cleaning the house, and washing dishes. We collected information if the man/woman performed these activities yesterday and how many minutes he/she spends on each activity. We also collected information on the women’s satisfaction with the amount of time that the man contributes towards household chores and child car. We ask this question both in general and specifically towards each of the eight household chores listed above. Furthermore, we collected information about the women’s perception on how the male has changed his participation in household chores between baseline and endline. Using the information collected, we construct two groups of outcome variables: one for the man’s participation in chores and one for woman’s perception about the man’s participation in chores.

Within the first group of outcome variables, we have the following indicators:
- Minutes spent on chores: continuous variables measuring the number of minutes the man/woman spent on each household chore, on all household chores, on public household chores, and private household chores
- Participation in chores or not: binary variable indicating whether the man/woman participated in a given household chore or not, an index variable constructed by counting the number of household chores in which the man/woman participated, an index variable constructed by counting the number of public household chores in which the man/woman participated, and an index variable constructed by counting the number of private household chores in which the man/woman participated

Within the second group of outcome variables, we have the following indicators:
- Likert scale variables indicating how satisfied the women is, with the amount of time the man contributes towards each household chores, public household chores, private household chores, and overall household chores.
- a variable indicating the women’s perception of the change in the man’s participation in household chores since baseline.

To evaluate the impacts of this behavioral intervention, we conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) using close to 900 participants in a rural program seeking to raise participants above the poverty line by enhancing their livelihoods activities. We seek to understand whether cell phones can be used to deepen program impacts by reinforcing behavior change communications. We randomly assign male household heads either to the treatment group, which receives phone-based reinforcement of training messages designed to encourage men to participate in household chores and child care, or the placebo group, which receives similar phone calls addressing an unrelated placebo topic. The treatment spans three months, with six phone calls placed on a biweekly schedule. During each call, a well-trained enumerator following a carefully designed script discusses gender norms with the male respondent, who is asked to commit to small weekly tasks designed to encourage increased male participation in household chores and child care. For the control group, an enumerator places calls at the same frequency but instead discusses a placebo topic – the man’s food consumption in the last 24 hours. We collect endline data from the female spouses of these male household heads two weeks following the final reinforcement phone call. We ask the female respondent detailed information about participation by each household member, including the male spouse, household chores and child care.

Following VESA level livelihoods and gender training provided to both women and their male partners, we conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) using participants of the LfR and SPIR programs. We randomly assign the men either to the treatment group or the placebo group. Subjects in the treatment group receive phone-based reinforcement of training messages designed to encourage them to participate in household chores and child care and those in the placebo group receive similar phone calls addressing an unrelated placebo topic. The treatment spans three months, with six phone calls placed on a biweekly schedule. During each call, a well-trained enumerator administers a carefully designed 5 minutes script in which he discusses gender norms with the male respondent. For the control group, an enumerator places calls at the same frequency but instead discusses a placebo topic – the man’s food consumption in the last 24 hours.

After the treatment is over, two weeks following the final reinforcement phone call, information on the outcome variables (i.e., male’s participation in household chores and child care) are collected from the targeted women through phone calls. We ask the women if the following activities were performed in service of the family yesterday: collecting fuelwood, fetching water, cooking, child care giving, processing grains, cleaning the house and washing dishes. We then ask who performed the activities and how many minutes were spent on these activities by the person who performed the activities, including the male spouse. These questions were also asked on the baseline survey. We will evaluate whether men in the treatment group participate in more household chores and child care than men in the control group at the end of the intervention period.

One possible concern in this experimental design is that the treatment (phone calls targeting specific males within a community) could influence the behavior of men in the same community who have been assigned to the control group. Randomly assigning communities to a treatment group (compared to individuals) would minimize this spillover problem, but also requires us to have a much larger sample that amplifies treatment and survey cost. After carefully considering both levels of treatment assignment, we decided to assign treatment at the individual level. In our decision, we considered the nature of the treatment, the outcome variables of interest and the direction of spillover bias. First, the treatment is complex enough that is not easily transferable to households in the control group. We administer six calls and discuss complex gender norms behavior that is very difficult for households in the control group to cope up with just simply through spillovers. For example, as part of the treatment, we ask the respondent to commit to fulfilling an assignment which requires him to do one of the household chores or child caring activity by the end of each call. Provided the respondent did the assignment, we allow him to slowly grow accustomed to the activities. For spillovers to exist, households in the control group would need to continue cope up with such activities for three months which is less likely. Second, our outcome variables consist of public and private household chores. For example, collecting fuelwood is public while bathing babies is private in the sense that it can be conducted without others in the neighborhood watching. We expect spillovers to be minimal on private household chores and we will separately analyze differences in the impact on public and private household chores to trace spillovers, if any. Third, spillovers will not make us overinflate our impact estimates because the spillovers would bias our treatment effect towards zero.

Another possible concern is related to mobile phone ownership. The experiment requires mobile phone ownership, but respondents may or may not own a mobile phone. Sampling only those who own mobile phones would introduce selection bias. For the same reason, the “Her Time” research project distributes free mobile phones to all respondents regardless of treatments status. Although mobile ownership has a potential effect on outcome variables, this effect will occur in all treatment groups. We will interpret our results accordingly, providing appropriate caveat about their external validity, particularly that the results may not be generalizable to poor households that do not participate in livelihoods groups and do not own mobile phones.

This experimental design allows the research team to carefully and credibly measure the effect of using phone calls to reinforce complex behavior change communications.

The “Her Time” research project in which this study is nested collects data from 60 VESAs in 8 waves over the course of a year, randomly assigning VESAs to waves. In each VESA, data collection activities consist of an in-person baseline questionnaire followed by 7-12 days of phone surveys and in-person validation interviews, according to their treatment assignment in the “Her Time” study. The project also conducts gender norms information intervention, in which male partners of the women will be treated with information about acceptability of men performing chores that are traditionally allocated to women. The gender norms information experiment is conducted just after the baseline, its treatment is assigned orthogonally to the treatment assignment of the time use study and collects an endline data through the 7-12 days of phone surveys and in-person validation interviews. On completion of these activities, households are randomly assigned to a treatment or control group for this reinforcement study, with treatment stratified by treatment assignment of the gender norms information experiment and age of the male partner collected on the baseline. By making sure that no consecutive individuals are assigned to the treatment when respondents are sorted by age, we make the treatment and control groups balanced in terms of age.

Randomization is at the individual level except for survey wave, which is at the VESA level.

No

60 clusters.

900 households

450 women's male partners are assigned to treatment, and 450 are assigned to the control group.

We are aiming for a Minimum Detectable Effect Size of a quarter of the standard deviation of each outcome variable described.