Time devoted to productive activities by the primary man increases by 14%, driven exclusively by livestock activities. Women’s empowerment improves, with an index of 6 indicator groups increasing by 0.38 SD. The program also improves child health and education outcomes: the under-five diarrhea rate decreases by 8 percentage points from 51%, and school enrollment increases by 6 percentage points. We estimate that the benefits of the program are likely to exceed the cost: A calibration exercise suggests a benefit-cost ratio of 2.3 and an internal rate of return of 26%, which is large compared to existing TUP studies.

Our study makes three main contributions.

First, we find positive and significant impacts of the TUP program in a fragile and conflict setting. Existing evidence on similar TUP programs comes largely from stable contexts.<sup>5</sup> In addition, the impacts reported in the Afghanistan TUP are the largest of any of the TUP pilot programs evaluated so far. For example, the increase in consumption of 30% is larger than the 18%-21% increase in Ethiopia, India and Bangladesh three to four years after the asset transfer (Banerjee et al, 2015; Bandiera et al, 2017). These results point to the potential of this multi-faceted intervention to reduce poverty even in extremely challenging settings.

Second, the intervention was successful in improving women’s labor participation in a context where gender gaps in access to assets and inputs, and discrimination in paid employment, are the norm. The results suggest that the program gives previously underemployed women economic opportunities in a context with important constraints to women’s labor participation. In addition, our study demonstrates that transfers to women can have large effects, in contrast to some evidence suggesting limited impacts on women’s business outcomes from cash transfers (de Mel et al., 2008). These results, together with the improvements in women’s empowerment, point to the TUP as a program that can reduce gender gaps as well as achieve its overall objective of reducing extreme poverty particularly in fragile and conflict-affected areas.

Third, these results add to a small but growing literature showing that addressing multiple constraints simultaneously can catalyze productive investments and reduce persistent poverty in a cost-effective way. The impacts on income and consumption observed here support the potential of multi-faceted interventions to generate long-term reductions in poverty (Banerjee et al., 2015; Bandiera et al., 2017; Blattman et al., 2014; Blattman et al., 2016) and, to a more limited extent, improvements in women’s empowerment (Bandiera et al., forthcoming). However, evidence from extremely fragile settings such as Afghanistan remains scarce. Our results are consistent with the limited evidence on interventions aiming to generate impacts in poor and fragile states, which suggests that injections of capital can stimulate self-employment and raise long-term earning potential, often when implemented

> 5 The results from a TUP program in the Republic of Yemen are forthcoming and will add to the evidence of the program in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

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