# **1 Motivation**

Empowerment allows individuals to reach their full potential, to improve their political and social participation, and to believe in their own capabilities. Gender empowerment also has important ramifications for the rest of the household; empowered women have fewer children and higher child survival rates (Rosenzweig and Schultz, 1982; Dyson and Moore, 1983), healthier and better-fed children (Lundberg, Pollak and Wales, 1997; Kanbur and Haddad, 1994), and a generally greater allocation of resources to children (Thomas, 1990; Handa, 1996). Development programs aim to empower women by increasing their control over contraceptive choices, by providing them access to credit, and through education.

Women’s empowerment is particularly hard to achieve within a generation because it is driven not only by information about choices, but also by the acceptability of these choices, and what Kabeer (1994) calls the “power within”, i.e. a woman’s intrinsic belief in her ability to control resources and to make decisions. Communities are often governed by strict social norms, which can both be driven by and drive the choices traditionally made by women in the village. If the social stigma associated with working outside the home or using contraceptives is prohibitive, then mere access to education or birth control may not change empowerment outcomes. Instead, giving a woman access to others who have made different choices can expand her information set and demonstrate the outcomes associated with these choices. As an alternative to targeting individual women, empowerment for women may be affected by combining learning and influence through community action and peer networks.

In this paper, we use primary data from rural north India to examine the impact of a program called _Mahila Samakhya_ on female empowerment outcomes. _Mahila Samakhya_ aims to empower women by educating them. The program provides literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training. The program also creates support groups on issues of social importance, such as domestic violence and alcoholism. These support groups strengthen networks, which plays an important role in determining empowerment. We measure empowerment using (1) the ownership of identification cards for the national government’s rural employment guarantee scheme, which proxies for access to outside employment, (2) the ability to leave the household without permission, which reflects physical mobility, and (3) participation in weekly village council meetings, which measures political participation. The literature identifies access to outside employment, physical mobility, and political participation as three important components of gender empowerment. These variables represent a wide variety of domains in which a program like _Mahila Samakhya_ can empower women: economically, domestically, and socially.

_Mahila Samakhya_ is an innovative approach to improving female empowerment. While a number of programs aim to improve female empowerment through education, _Mahila Samakhya_ combines education with support groups, and has the explicit objective of increasing gender empowerment. We posit that this program affects female bargaining power in two ways. First, education provided by the program directly improves job prospects and increases the reservation wage. By increasing a woman’s earning potential, the program helps improve her bargaining position, allowing her to control a greater share of the household’s resources and to become a more active participant in her community. Further, the program may have an indirect effect through improved information flows that may change social norms. These social spillovers also empower participants who do not have access to outside employment and thus do not benefit from the direct employment aspect of _Mahila Samakhya_ (Montgomery and Casterline, 1996). As a result, even unemployed participants and non-participants may be empowered by _Mahila Samakhya_ .

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