community-level programs often poses the dual difficulty of imprecisely-measured outcomes and a “treatment” that is hard to identify. In this paper, we use changes in outcomes and an instrument suggested by detailed field tests to disentangle the mechanisms of the program and identify the effect of the program on female empowerment.

Few other papers study _Mahila Samakhya_ ; one of these papers focuses on the program’s effect on building village-level social capital and trust rather than studying its intended impact on female empowerment (Janssens, 2010). In other work, Kandpal and Baylis (2013) explore whether _Mahila Samakhya_ affects the diversity of participants’ peer group, while Kandpal and Baylis (2011) study whether peers’ participation improves female bargaining power and child welfare outcomes; neither of these studies explicitly estimates treatment effects of the program’s intended impact, which is to empower women through participation.

This paper contributes to the literature in several ways. It is the first to evaluate the impact of _Mahila Samakhya_ on empowerment outcomes and provides robust estimates of the various effects of this program. We decompose the effect of community-level interventions like _Mahila Samakhya_ into its three components: (1) a direct effect that works through employment opportunities outside the family farm, (2) a direct effect that works through higher reservation wages, and (3) an indirect effect that works through the channels of social influence and learning. As a result, this paper may provide valuable evidence on the effectiveness of community-level interventions in changing ingrained social outcomes like women’s bargaining power. Our results establish that the _Mahila Samakhya_ program directly and indirectly increases female empowerment.

# **2 Background on Uttarakhand and** **_Mahila Samakhya_**

Uttarakhand is a a small rural state in the Indian Himalayas, comprising less than one percent of the Indian population. Only five cities in the state contain more than 100,000 people. On the surface, Uttarakhandi women may appear to be more empowered than the average. These women led the _Chipko_ movement to prevent deforestation<sup>1</sup> as well as the demand for a separate state. However, while the state has a literacy rate of 72 percent, the Census reports that only 60 percent of all women are literate.<sup>2</sup> A more detailed measure of literacy from a nationally representative household survey finds 43 percent of Uttarakhandi women cannot read at all, while an additional 5 percent can only read parts of a sentence (International Institute for Population Studies and Macro International, 2007). Therefore, the effective literacy rate for females may be closer to 50 percent.

Although 43 percent of all Uttarakhandi women work, nearly two-thirds of these women (64 percent) are not paid for their work, and over 70 percent work in agriculture. These women are likely to work on their family’s farmland, which does little to empower them. In addition, 23 percent of Uttarakhandi women have no say over household financial decisions, and almost 43 percent do not have the final say on their own healthcare. Over half (55 percent) did not have the final say on large purchases made by their household (International Institute for Population Studies and Macro International, 2007). Hence, Uttarakhandi women can have little say in the household or community.

In 1988, _Mahila Samakhya_ was launched in three states of India to empower women through formal, informal, and vocational education. In theory, the community-level program was placed

> 1The Hindi word _Chipko_ means “to stick”. In the _Chipko_ movement of the seventies, Uttarakhandi villagers, and women in particular, literally hugged trees to prevent deforestation.

> 2The national literacy rate is 65 percent, and female literacy of 54 percent. The most literate state is Kerala, with a 91 percent overall literacy rate and 88 percent female literacy rate.

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