Electrifying Empowerment: Women Role Models and Solar Electrification in Rural Myanmar

In many settings, gender norms constrain women’s agency and discourage them from pursuing fruitful economic opportunities. To study this issue, authors run a randomized control trial in 33 solar-powered and 33 unelectrified villages in rural Myanmar. They test a psychological intervention that combines an edutainment component featuring role models with a visualization, goal-setting, and planning workshop. The treatment aims to increase women's empowerment, encourage higher aspirations, and provide participants with a blueprint to pursue them effectively. To test whether the effects of the intervention vary by the level of energy access, we stratified the village-level randomization by region and electrification status. The intervention increased women’s business and financial empowerment, including by raising the share of women who had their own savings, banking, and mobile money account, with larger effects for less empowered women at baseline. Effects on aspirations are concentrated in unelectrified villages, where authors find positive impacts on a novel measure of aspirations for productive appliances and on aspirations for children's education. Consistent with the shift in aspirations, they also see a parallel increase in education expenditures, the time women spend on childcare, and the probability that households took out a business loan in these villages. Findings show that interventions targeting aspirations interact with the local economic environment and are most effective when they provide relevant role models for pathways such as education, which are particularly valuable where other investment opportunities, including productive uses of electricity, are constrained.