Do ‘Women hold up half the sky’ in fuel choices? Revisiting the role of adolescent empowerment in a developing country context
研究了印度SABLA女性赋权项目对家庭烹饪燃料选择的影响，发现受项目影响的女性婚后更可能使用清洁高效燃料，同时健康行为改善。
In this paper, we study the impact of a multidimensional women’s empowerment programme in India, known as SABLA, on the choice of cooking fuel within the household. The programme, launched in 2010 as a pilot project in 205 districts of the country, provided support to women across a multitude of dimensions. We exploit plausibly exogenous geographic and cohort variation generated in the implementation of the SABLA programme using a difference-in-difference identification design. The results of our study, based on this quasi-experimental methodology and using data on 21 states of India from the DLHS-4 survey, suggest that women potentially exposed to the SABLA empowerment programme were more likely to use cleaner and efficient modern cooking fuels post-marriage. This high usage of modern cooking fuels is matched by a fall in the likelihood of using inefficient transitional and traditional cooking fuels. We also show that women potentially exposed to the programme now exhibit improved health behaviors in the context of their children’s as well as their own health. These improved health behaviors, when combined with the empowering effects of the programme in other domains, as evidenced by the literature, serve as potential mechanisms for our effects. The results of our study remain robust to a variety of sensitivity checks and analyses.