This paper estimates the costs and Return on Investment of JEEViKA – a government-implemented rural livelihoods program that works with women’s self-help groups (SHGs) to promote financial inclusion, collective action, and livelihoods for rural women in Bihar, India. We estimate program costs using annual audit reports and combine the estimated costs with data from a randomized controlled trial that examined impacts on high-cost informal loans and consumption at two points – two years post, and seven years post program start.

While impact evaluations of formalized savings groups show that they can improve financial inclusion and women’s economic empowerment in a variety of settings in sub-Saharan Africa, only very few studies examine the impact of informal savings groups. This paper examines the association between informal savings group membership, individual-level asset ownership, and household-level decision-making power for men and women using panel data from a nationally representative sample from Nigeria.

African governments increasingly support large-scale women’s groups interventions aiming to improve women’s economic empowerment with support from multilateral donors and Foundations. Previous evidence indicates that women’s savings, producer, and livelihoods groups can improve women’s access to savings and credit, and human as well as social capital, but it is less clear if the findings of existing evidence are transferable to women’s groups without a discernible focus on financial inclusion or livelihoods.

Using data on a large women’s livelihoods program in India – the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) – and a difference-in-differences design, this paper estimates that average monthly savings by SHG members of the NRLM declined by 85% during the nationwide lockdown from March to July of 2020. Decline in monthly SHG savings was likely driven by loss in income sources combined with lockdown stringency.

The Evidence Consortium on Women’s Groups conducted a study to examine the convergence between large-scale self-help groups and public works programming in Bihar. We use publicly available administrative data from the National Rural Livelihoods Mission and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) and merge those data with data from a randomised controlled trial (RCT). The combined dataset allows for an instrumental variable regression analysis to examine the impact of the number of SHG members on access to job cards and employment under MGNREGS.

This paper presents emerging evidence from studies in diverse contexts in sub-Saharan Africa —with a deep dive into Nigeria and Uganda—on how COVID-19 has affected women’s groups and how these groups have helped mitigate the gendered effects of the pandemic’s and the associated policy responses’ consequences up until April 2021. The synthesis presents evidence that savings groups found ways to continue operating, provided leadership opportunities for women during the pandemic, and mitigated some of the negative economic consequences of COVID-19 on individual savings group members.

Interventions with women’s groups are increasingly seen as an important strategy for advancing women’s empowerment, health, and economic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, with the potential to increase the resiliency of members and their communities during widespread covariate shocks, such as COVID-19. This evidence synthesis compiles evidence from past shocks on women’s group activities and the extent to which women’s groups mitigate the effects of shocks on members and communities.

This ECWG review of reviews aimed to assess what interventions, especially group-based interventions, show promise in economically empowering adolescent girls and young women in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). In addition, we examined the promise of specific economic components, combinations of components, and core topics. We searched five databases as well as other sources and identified 2,467 citations, resulting in 17 reviews, 10 of which quantified their results.

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