<mark>intervention and the beneficiaries’ uncertainty about future public works opportunities. Accompanying these modest gains in food expenditure, there are—at best—modest gains in</mark> food diversity for young children at midline (Annex A Table 5).

<mark>It is possible that some of the income gains from the public works program are used to smooth consumption over time in the months following program completion. Households offered public works are more likely to have savings or insurance. And by endline, after a program has ended, they are more likely to make mortgage payments and owe less to grocers as well as less likely to buy groceries on credit, though these effects are not statistically significant.</mark><sup>21</sup>

# **5.5. Intra-household transfers and women’s empowerment**

In a setting with restrictive gender norms and limited income opportunities for women, the following question arises: Do women keep the income they earn from public works? To answer this question, we administered an innovative module which collected weekly data on intra-household money transfers. We find that the women offered the opportunity to engage in public works are 6.2 percentage points more likely to report giving money to their husbands (see Table 6). This rate, however, is far lower than the rate of program take-up. The aforementioned result is consistent with Islamic social norms whereby women control their own assets and income (Tucker, 2008). On the other hand, based on the program effect (when the income is given), the implied amount of income that women give to their husbands seems much larger than their income gains: 305 DFJ is the transfer effect, which, when applied to the 6.2 percent of women, suggests a transfer of nearly 5,000 FDJ, when the income gains are only about 3,000 FDJ.

The program has no effect on husbands’ income transfers to their wives. Three-quarters of husbands participating in the program report giving money to their wives in at least one of the three weekly surveys at midline (not shown). The weighted rate of intra-household transfer from husbands to wives is, therefore, 57 percent. Moreover, women report receiving nearly 90 percent of their husbands’ mean labor income. This is a surprising finding but, we think, reflects the fact that women do most of the purchasing and preparation of food and other consumables, and these are poor households. When taking this large portion into consideration and in light of the fact that women rarely transfer their income to their husbands, these findings show that female beneficiaries obtained a significant net increase in income through their participation in the public works program. Not surprisingly, given

> 21 A caveat for these findings is that the magnitudes of the different effects do not add up to the observed total increase in labor income. Obtaining accurate estimates of expenditures is methodologically less challenging than estimating savings. Respondents often have no incentive to provide precise reports about their savings, which is a sensitive topic and less apparent to the rest of the community. These methodological aspects, together with our endline results, suggest that a reduction in household indebtedness occurred, leading us to conjecture that the participants mostly saved their increased income.

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