Engendering Women’s Collective Efficacy in Malawi: A Field Experimental Design

• In Event: Emerging Research on Gender and Political Participation in Developing Countries

Abstract

While citizen engagement and satisfaction with local governance is generally low in Malawi, women participate even less in local politics than men: On the most recent Afrobarometer Malawi survey, 60% of women report “never” discussing politics (versus only 43% of men); only 11% of women report having contacted their local councilor in the last year (versus 21% of men); and only 17% of women report knowing about recent land reforms (versus 37% of men). Against this backdrop, our proposed research aims to understand how to improve both the quantity and quality of women’s non-electoral political participation.

As part of a coordinated set of experimental designs across five countries (EGAP’s Metaketa V), we will implement a field experiment on women’s collective efficacy and political engagement in Malawi. We propose a set of interventions that address three key barriers to women’s equal political participation in consultative channels: (1) women’s lower levels of political knowledge and civic skills (both real and perceived), (2) the propensity for women to identity with other women as collective members of a marginalized group (collective members), and (3) social norms that constrain women’s observed behavior in the presence of men. In our intervention, women’s village savings and loan (VSLA) groups will be randomly selected to attend either facilitated sessions aimed at engendering a sense of collective efficacy (treatment), or a set of trainings on financial literacy and business training (control). The collective efficacy training will guide members through exercises aimed at building collective consciousness, or identifying with women as a group. The trainings will also be designed to increase political knowledge, skills, and capacity to make demands of local government. In short, the trainings should increase both participants’ desire to participate in local politics as well as their effectiveness in doing so. We will then evaluate the effect of the collective efficacy sessions on women’s political interest and engagement around local public goods and services provision. The design document we will present focuses on the specific content of our proposed intervention: the guided discussions and group exercises that are aimed at addressing each of the three barriers discussed above. While our intervention is consistent with the broader set of coordinated Metaketa V interventions, its specific manifestation is designed with the local political and social context of Malawi in mind.

Authors

• Amanda Lea Robinson, Ohio State University

• Asiyati Lorraine Chiweza, University of Malawi

• Amanda Clayton, Vanderbilt University

• Boniface Madalitso Dulani