Inorganic fertilizer is one of a handful of agricultural technologies that have immense potential for raising the productivity of poor smallholders, enabling them to increase income, accumulate assets, and set themselves economically on a pathway out of poverty. The very low prevalence of...

India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is the largest public works employment project in the world. Its most direct poverty reduction pathway is through boosting employment and income for the poor. How effectively this direct transfer mechanism reduces...

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a new survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector. The WEAI was initially developed as a tool to reflect women’s empowerment that may result from the United States...

Group-based interventions are fast gaining traction in developing countries, often bolstering existing government service delivery systems. Such groups provide development programs with a means of extending their reach to households and individuals that might otherwise not seek public goods and...

The Million Farmers School (MFS) is an innovative extension program initiated by the Department of Agriculture in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, in 2017. Twice in a year, the department deploys its entire extension machinery to organize nearly 15,000 training programs for about a million...

In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor...

This paper reviews recent conceptual and empirical developments regarding household behavior and gender norms in developing countries covering the following general topics: (1) what do the data tell us about gender gaps in control and ownership of resources? (2) what have we learned about...

This paper examines the impact of non-cognitive (socio-emotional) skills on job market outcomes using a randomized control trial implemented in an online job portal in India. Job seekers who registered in the portal were asked to take a Big Five type personality test and, for a random sub-sample...

Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) have increasingly been used as a vehicle for social, political, and economic empowerment as well as a platform for service delivery. Although a growing body of literature shows evidence of positive impacts of SHGs on various measures of empowerment, our...

As stress on Indian agriculture increases because of several reasons, such as continuous fragmentation of landholdings and climate change, there is a serious threat to livelihood based on farming. This is particularly true for small farmers. Growing rural populations and constrained employment...