positive impact of the TUP intervention on treatment women’s psychological well-being, compared to the control group. This, together with the fact that treatment women report large levels of under-employment and idle time, and the positive impacts across multiple socioeconomic indicators, support the argument that treatment women’s well-being is not decreased by the intervention, even when taking into consideration the increased market participation. Taking all together, our results suggest that women’s empowerment was increased by the program, even in the most conservative scenario, that is, one when we exclude the direct effect of women’s market participation from our women’s empowerment indicator, and when we do not consider other indicators of socioeconomic well-being.

# **5.9 Shocks, Coping Mechanisms and Resilience**

To secure long-term, sustained growth out of extreme poverty in fragile settings, households need to be resilient to shocks. How does the TUP program help households cope with or limit the effects of shocks in ways that might help protect their potential future consumption and investments? The period between midline and endline presents an important test of the TUP program’s ability to increase household resilience in this way due to the level and extent of the exogenous shocks that occurred in Afghanistan, covered in detail in Section 2.

Table 9 shows that treatment and control households report a similarly high incidence of shocks affecting their income or livelihoods. We present two indicators: (i) the incidence of any shock affecting households’ livelihoods in the past year (collected in January–February 2021), and (ii) the incidence of the 16 types of shocks in the past month (collected in May–June 2021). Both indicators confirm that shocks are equally likely to occur in treatment and control households irrespective of the period analyzed. Our preferred measure highlighting the full extent of exposure to shocks comes from our 1-month incidence measure since it prompts for each one of 16 different types of shocks. Here we find that 60% of households in the treatment vs. 61% in control (p-value = 0.711) have had a shock exposure in the past month.<sup>31</sup> We present analyses of recovery and coping mechanism using shock exposure in the past year since this allows us to better reflect on the ability of the TUP program to strengthen households’ resilience to shocks over the medium term.

First, we find that the TUP program improves the ability of UP households to partially or fully recover from the shocks. As Table 9 shows, treatment households are 19.7 percentage points, or 53% (p-value =

> 0.025) more likely to have at least somewhat recovered from shocks occurred in the past year, compared to

> 31Exposure appears lower in the past 12 months (26% for treatment vs. 30% in control, p-value = 0.225), although this is, in part, a function of the questionnaire structure which first asked whether the household experienced any shock before asking for specific types of shock, likely underestimating shock incidence. While this means the absolute levels may be affected, there is no reason to believe this would affect responses differentially between the control and treatment groups.

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