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Abstract
This study assesses the impact of livestock transfer and associated training on women’s
empowerment in Zambia. Women’s empowerment is measured with women’s ‘decision making
power’ on different farm household activities and resources. Using a two-period panel data from
a field experiment in the Copperbelt Province, first, we demonstrate empirically that women’s
empowerment serves as a key driver of economic wellbeing; it has positive effects on consumption
expenditures and dietary diversity. We then use the difference-in-difference method with household
level fixed effects and find a significant positive impact of the intervention on both women and
men’s empowerment measures. While men and women from ‘treated’ households made most
household decisions jointly, the intervention had larger impact on women’s decision making
power. We demonstrate that the improvement in men and women’s decision making power largely
comes from expansion in joint decisions. In particular, the intervention helped increase the
proportion of joint decisions by 16% in all household activities considered and by 21% in decision
spheres related to the transferred assets. The finding is consistent with the prediction of the Nash
bargaining model because transferring economic resources to women members leads to pareto
optimality in resource allocation only through co-operation between men and women.