Women's empowerment as a result of ECOLECTIVOS (WERE)

PROJECT SUMMARY The United Nations and the World Health Organization have stated that empowering women is essential to achieving the goals of health, development, and gender equality. Women's empowerment is a multifaceted process, but it is still unclear how to quantify it and intervene most successfully. The societal contexts and social

environments of the communities where women live have a significant impact on women’s empowerment. Past research has focused on individual level interventions to improve women empowerment but the effect of community level interventions on women’s empowerment is not well studied. The purpose of this F31 fellowship,

entitled “Women’s Empowerment as a Result of the ECOLECTIVOS Trial (WERE)” is to study the effect of the community level working group intervention and group participation on women’s empowerment. WERE is an ancillary study of ECOLECTIVOS, an implementation research study (R01 ES032009, PI Thompson) that uses

a cluster-randomized village-level intervention (12 week working group sessions) to reduce the burning of plastic waste in household fires. Women develop new skills, such as starting a recycling program or making handicrafts from recycled plastic. Four hundred women in 16 villages will be recruited with 200 from the 8 intervention villages

invited to attend the working groups. WERE proposes to evaluate self-efficacy, household decision making, social capital, and community mobilization to assess women’s empowerment at baseline (before randomization) and 4 months later (after the working groups are concluded). The specific aims for WERE are: (1) To examine

the intervention effect on self-efficacy, household decision making, social capital, and community mobilization within individuals over time and between the intervention and control groups over time (baseline vs.4 months); (2) To study the effect of sociodemographic factors like age, socioeconomic status, and household size on self-

efficacy, household decision making, social capital, and community mobilization among both study groups using multi-level modelling to account for individual and community level factors; and (Exploratory Aim) To conduct a per-protocol analysis to whether higher participation in ECOLECTIVOS working groups, among the participants

of intervention group, shows a dose-response function in increasing household decision making, self-efficacy, social capital, and community mobilization. Findings from this study will contribute to the scientific evidence on the effects of community-level interventions on women’s empowerment at the individual level, in low resource

community settings like Guatemala.