women from accessing FP services freely and independently.<sup>4</sup> Women’s social connections may be especially critical to overcoming these barriers related to physically accessing FP for women who are not permitted to, or want to, visit health centers alone, and whose family members may be unwilling to accompany them to clinics because they are opposed to women’s FP use.<sup>5</sup> However, our sample women lack social connections and have limited engagement with existing peers. At baseline, nearly 36 percent of our sample reported speaking to only their husbands and mothers-in-law about issues related to FP-RH; an average woman in our sample reported interacting with less than one other individual besides her husband and motherin-law in her village. Women living in households characterized by discordance in fertility preferences may be doubly disadvantaged if their social network access itself is constrained by those very same preference-discordant family members, like mothers-in-law.<sup>6</sup> Indeed, the lack of social connections is a salient barrier for any intervention that requires women to “cross the boundary” in contexts where their physical mobility is constrained (Jayachandran, 2021) by household members or social norms.<sup>7</sup> With these considerations in mind, we conducted a 10-month-long randomized controlled trial that enabled women to incentivize other women to socialize with them to form new social connections, strengthen peer engagement, and improve their reproductive autonomy by lowering dependence on influential household members, such as mothers-in-law and husbands.<sup>8</sup> We provided a randomly selected group of women in our sample a voucher package for subsidized FP services at a local clinic for their own use **_as well as_** for any peers other than their husbands who accompanied them to the clinic at least once (“Bring-a-Friend (BAF)” voucher group). To separately identify the additional effect of enabling women to seek peer support from the effect of having a voucher for one’s own use, a randomly selected group of women were provided the voucher package only for their own use and not for their peers (“Own” voucher group). The remaining sample was assigned to the control group and did not receive the voucher package.<sup>9</sup>

> 4In our sample, 56 percent of women at baseline reported not being allowed to visit a health facility alone and 44 percent of women reported having no say in decisions about their health care. Moreover, 75 percent of women reported misalignment in their fertility preferences with respect to their mothers-in-law (Anukriti et al., 2022), who typically want them to have more children than they desire.

> 5Women may prefer not to visit health clinics alone due to low confidence in interacting with health care providers and concerns about safety.

> 6Discordant mothers-in-law may strategically curtail their daughter-in-law’s ability to form peer connections to prevent outside influences from affecting the daughter-in-law’s fertility outcomes in ways that potentially deviate from the mother-in-law’s preferences (Anukriti et al., 2020).

> 7Based on data from 52 developing countries, Klugman et al. (2014) document that physical mobility barriers are widespread, especially among younger adult women, and can have detrimental effects on women’s opportunities and choices.

> 8Reproductive autonomy is defined as having the power to decide and control contraceptive use, pregnancy, and childbearing (Purdy, 2006; Upadhyay et al., 2014).

> 9The voucher package that was received by treated women comprised one free FP consultation, a voucher worth INR 2,000 (USD 28) for FP services, and reimbursements for transportation to visit the clinic.

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