Deeply energizing to get to meet young (and less young!) researchers at the Women and Jobs in Africa workshop the AGIL co-organized last week at the University of Ghana, along with The World Bank Center for Research on Women and Jobs and African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET).

Thrilled to finally share #AfricaGIL new ESTEEM website bringing together years of work on socioemotional skills (SES) across Sub-Saharan Africa — from measurement tools to training curricula and research evidence. #WEE #GenderEquality #SoftSkills #SocioEmotionalSkills

Effective Socio-emotional Skills to Gain Economic Empowerment (ESTEEM) | IPA

poverty-action.org

Evidence from Tanzania: while self-reported socioemotional skills show a gender gap (in favor of men), behavioral measures show few, + smaller gaps - suggesting underlying pattern is men's overestimation of own skills! joint w/@rchlcassidy @claradelav tinyurl.com/mw5vcyf4

Honored to moderate this discussion on women’s agency and the power of group models. Join us tomorrow to learn more about what shapes women’s decision-making, how groups improve outcomes for women and girls, and why these insights should influence measurement, programming, and future research.

Our new working paper dives into the challenges rural women in Sub-Sahran Africa face in adapting to climate change and sets an agenda for future policy research. #AfricaGIL #ClimateJustice #GenderEquality #Africa #Adaptation documents.worldbank.org/en/publicati...

Women and Climate Adaptation in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa : Constraints and Research Priorities

Sub-Saharan Africa is highly vulnerable to climate change, with rural women dis- proportionately affected due to pre-existing gender inequalities that both increase their .

documents.worldbank.org

Excited to present our paper at the CSAE conference Tuesday! We’ll talk about the impacts of socioemotional skills trainings on economic empowerment for agribusiness owners in Nigeria. #AfricaGIL #EconSky #OxCSAE2025

CSAE@oxfordcsae.bsky.social · 2y ago

Join in with the CSAE Conference 2025 with us here on BlueSky! Presenting a paper? Amazed by the research? Looking forward to the keynote? Mention us & #OxCSAE2025

Looking forward to being part of this UN CSW panel bringing together governments, researchers, and civil society on how social protection can advance gender equality across a woman’s life course This Thursday... Join us! #AfricaGIL #EconSky @unicef.org

The DHS Program is officially done. As I tell my statistics students, good data is ESSENTIAL to improve the world. We can’t make things better if we don’t know the current state of things. No new DHS data collection is an incalculable loss. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/h...

Trump Administration Ends Global Health Research Program

The Demographic and Health Surveys were the only sources of reliable information in many countries on metrics such as mortality, nutrition and education.

nytimes.com

Heather Randell@heatherrandell.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Program is the gold standard for data on health, nutrition, and socioeconomic development across the world. As with so many other critical data collection endeavors, it is currently “on pause”.

Does free sound too cheap? Here's new evidence on something that did not work to get young people enrolled in vocational training programs in Côte d’Ivoire: sending text messages highlighting that the program is free... #AfricaGIL #EconSky

2. A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Empowering women starts with engaging everyone. 🫂 Our recent GIL policy brief summarizes the evidence on engaging men for women's economic empowerment. openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/pub... #GenderEquality #WomenEmpowerment #SocialChange #EconSky #AfricaGIL @rajdevbrar.bsky.social

Men may behave more aggressively than they would want to if they wrongly believe this is what other men (and women) view as « manly » - not crying or using violence to get respect. Here is recent experimental evidence on this from Rio de Janeiro. #EconSky #gender blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

School discussions reshape perceptions of masculinity norms. Guest Post by Ieda Matavelli

blogs.worldbank.org

2025 ECON5k starts December 1! Details are here sites.google.com/view/econ5k, including how to get a t-shirt and how to upload your results. Please also feel free to post your results on BlueSky with the hashtag #ECON5k!

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Economists running @econ5k.bsky.social the.econ5k@gmail.com

sites.google.com

Over half of African girls ages 15 to 19 are out of school or married or have children. Our recent report dives into promising ways to address these challenges. EVENT LAUNCH is NOW!! Register here to join virtually or in person: www.worldbank.org/en/events/20... #africagil #EconSky #gender

Pathways to Prosperity for Adolescent Girls in Africa Report Launch

Africa is home to 145 million adolescent girls today - a number projected to represent one-third of the world’s adolescent girls by 2050. Investing in the potential of adolescent girls is crucial for ...

worldbank.org

Join us NOW for a rich discussion on new measures of goal-setting, self-efficacy and locus of control validated in various African countries. A prerequisite for informing policies seeking to improve women's agency! #AfricaGIL #EconSky @WBG_AfricaGIL

I'm again seeking to organize sessions on violence against women as well as mental health in LMICs for the 2025 Ashecon conference in Nashville. If you're interested, please contact me (drop a response here or email me - DMs are not open, but my email is on my website)

Join us for an insightful seminar on socioemotional skills, discrimination and hiring practices! #Skills4Dev #AfricaGIL #EconSky @yashodhan.bsky.social

Excited to share our recent brief on tweaks to social protection programs that work for improving gender equality in Africa: childcare, socio-emotional skills, engaging men, and more! Drawn from #AfricaGIL research #EconSky openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/c...

ungatedresearch.org is a wonderful public good being developed by Martin Abel and Susie Godlonton. It's a website with links to the latest ungated version of papers published in several economics journals. Especially valuable in LMICs where many scholars don't have access to the journals.

Giving smallholder farmers access to warrantage (storing their crops and, when they choose so, using that as a collateral to obtain credit) helps them invest more in human and farm capital. Sharing our recent experimental evidence from Burkina Faso #econsky

Warrantage: A model of rural finance that boosts farmers’ income and investment

Warrantage is an innovative model of rural finance which improves access to credit and crop storage. In Burkina Faso, warrantage increased farmers’ sales revenues, which they spent on education, healt...

voxdev.org

Our new paper shows that men benefit from couples' long-distance joint moves more than women do, in both Germany and Sweden. Is this just b/c men are usually the main breadwinner? No, it's hard to explain the patterns we see w/o a gender norm prioritizing men's careers. www.nber.org/papers/w32970

Still on that same topic of what drives women's fertility choices: sharing excellent recent work by my GIL colleagues showing that boosting women's income boosts their fertility too as a means to ensure long-term economic security: voxdev.org/topic/health...

How development programmes impact fertility rates in Africa

New causal evidence shows boosting African women's income and wealth increases fertility, particularly among women without a son, suggesting that this fertility increase is a means to safeguard long-t...

voxdev.org

Happening tomorrow! Discussing this great paper on the important topic of women's fertility choices in Burkina Faso #Econsky

And here: Unpacking Socio-Emotional Skills for Women’s Economic Empowerment [brief] documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/3... 11/11

Learn more about World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab’s SES research here. Which Socio-Emotional Skills Matter Most for Women’s Earnings? New Insights from Sub-Saharan Africa [brief] openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/pub... 10/n

🙏 Special thanks to our partners at BRAC Tanzania, IPA, IFC, Trinity College Dublin, & the teams that made this research possible. Thanks also to our funders (Wellspring, IDRC, FCDO, UFGE) for supporting this work. 9/n

You can download the full paper here: documents.worldbank.org/en/publicati... This paper is part of a larger #RCT testing the relative impact of different SES trainings targeted at young women and men in Tanzania. Stay tuned for those results in the near future! 8/n

Do Men Really Have Greater Socio-Emotional Skills Than Women ? Evidence from Tanzanian Youth

Individuals’ socio-emotional skills (SES), and their perceptions of their skill levels, matter for labor market outcomes and other welfare outcomes. Men appear to have .

documents.worldbank.org

Implications: This study challenges the use of self-reported SES data and calls for the use of better, behavior-based measures of SES which can improve the targeting and design of SES interventions. The findings also point to the potential to correct young men’s misperceptions of their own SES. 7/n

Third: Young men in this setting tend to over-estimate their skills, contributing to the mismatch between the self-reported gaps & behavioral measures of SES. This finding is consistent w/evidence from US lab experiments on overconfidence of young males in their math and science abilities. 6/n

🔎 So, what did we find? First: Self-reported SES gender gaps are large (0.2σ), but they virtually disappear when measured behaviorally. Second: The male advantage in self-reported SES correlates positively w/social desirability bias, lower cognitive skills levels, & less gender-equitable views. 5/n