Cash Transfers and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in Low- and Middle-Income Settings

PROJECT NOTE JUNE 2021 Cash Transfers and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in Low- and Middle-Income Settings A Joint Research Agenda to Inform Policy and Practice The Cash Transfer & IPV Research Collaborative and Innovations for Poverty Action, with input from the research and practice community1 1. Motivation and Background Over the last five years, there has been increasing interest from global stakeholders in the relationship between cash transfers and gender-based violence, and in particular, intimate partner violence (IPV). Interest has grown both within the development and humanitarian spaces, although empirical research is mainly concentrated in the former. A mixed-method review paper published in 2018 found that, across 22 quantitative or qualitative studies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the majority (73%) showed that cash decreased IPV; however, two studies showed mixed effects, and several others showed heterogenous impacts (Buller et al. 2018). A more recent meta-analysis of 14 experimental and quasi- experimental cash transfer studies found average decreases in physical/sexual IPV (4 percentage points (pp)), emotional IPV (2 pp) and controlling behaviors (4 pp) (Baranov et al. 2021). A feature of this literature is the high representation of evaluations from Latin America, primarily government conditional cash transfer programs. In addition, programming was generally focused on poverty-related objectives, and none of the programming was explicitly designed to affect IPV or violence outcomes more broadly. 1 This research agenda was drafted by Amber Peterman and Shalini Roy, with inputs from Melissa Hidrobo, Lucy Billings, Tia Palermo, Clare Barrington, Meghna Ranganathan, Ana Maria Buller and Lori Heise (Cash Transfer and IPV Research Collaborative), Pace Phillips and Ellen Bates-Jeffreys (IPA), as well as workshop participants at the “Cash Transfers and IPV: Sharing Evidence & Aligning Research Agendas to Inform Policy” event, held on October 29-30, 2020 (see Annex C). We gratefully acknowledge the support from an anonymous donor. For questions or comments: Amber Peterman ([email protected]) and Shalini Roy ([email protected]). 1 Since the time that literature was compiled for the aforementioned reviews, the number of papers examining the relationship between cash and IPV has nearly doubled. This second generation of studies involves increasingly complex designs that are able to unpack mechanisms (e.g. Lees et al. 2020 in Mali), examine the role of possible design features (e.g. WFP 2019 cross-country), disentangle effects of complementary programming (e.g. Haushofer et al. 2019), examine post-intervention impacts (e.g. Roy et al. 2020) and expand the geographic scope of previous evidence (e.g. Briaux et al. 2020 in Togo; Peterman et al. 2021 in Ghana; Iqbal et al. 2020 in Pakistan). Moreover, additional work exploring these relationships is underway. With the increased spotlight on the role of social protection in the COVID-19 response and recovery, as well as a prominent narrative on gendered impacts of the pandemic, the importance of this work is expected to grow in the future. A focus on the intersection of cash transfers and IPV is of interest to stakeholders in LMICs for several additional reasons. From a policy perspective, cash transfers and other social safety nets are attractive instruments for addressing violence, as they are rapidly expanding in resource-poor settings (social safety nets reach approximately 2.5 billion people in LMICs; World Bank 2018) and often directly reach women and the most vulnerable segments of society. Therefore, reductions within programmatic periods found to date (which range from 11 to 66%) are policy-relevant, and offer a notable platform for at-scale reductions (Buller et al. 2018). This widespread reach is an important consideration, as dedicated IPV programming has struggled to maintain quality and achieve cost-effectiveness at scale. Second, as social protection programs have largely been designed without violence (or gender equality) as an objective, learning more about possible gender- and violence-sensitive design components, offers potential additional benefits which could be leveraged to achieve cross-sectoral objectives. Accordingly, the RESPECT framework highlighting promising prevention responses for violence against women has included economic transfers as a core recommended strategy within the ‘reduced poverty’ domain (WHO 2019). In addition, evaluation learning from cash and other economic transfers offers opportunities to learn more about linkages between poverty, women’s economic empowerment and violence more broadly. These insights are valuable for stakeholders interested in better understanding violence and how it relates to women’s status in the household and community, including how to leverage policy and programmatic interventions that increase income earning and employment, asset ownership, and broader social protection coverage. 2. A Joint Research Agenda The growing interest in the relationship between cash and IPV across different research and implementing organizations is an important development, as these institutions’ diverse agendas can be leveraged to fill research gaps and inform policy at a rapid pace with a coordinated research agenda. Rather than working in silos, there are recognized benefits to sharing information, coordinating, and aligning this work. In the absence of formal collaboration, there are also gains to learning from one another during the research process—particularly during a fast-moving research environment linked to the COVID-19 response. In October of 2020, the Cash Transfer and IPV Research Collaborative and Innovations for Poverty Action convened a workshop with researchers, implementers and donors with the overall goal of sharing the latest evidence and emerging research and discussing research gaps and priority questions. More specifically, the workshop objectives were to: 2 ► Understand the landscape of emerging research and research frontiers related to cash transfers and IPV (including cash plus and linkages to broader social protection) via information sharing and research presentations; ► Brainstorm how organizations can better align and complement their future research agendas particularly around cash transfers, IPV and COVID-19; ► Foster collaboration between the fields of public health and development economics, with respect to violence prevention, thereby encouraging better cross fertilization regarding research questions, ethics and measurement. What follows is a joint research agenda building on workshop discussions and consultations across a wide range of stakeholders (See Annex C for list workshop participants). This is meant to be a living document, to help guide priorities and coordinate knowledge generation across stakeholders, building on and complementing broader research agendas on global knowledge generation on violence prevention (SVRI & The Equality Institute, 2020). In addition, workplans shared in Annex A and B are meant to provide concrete information on forthcoming and ongoing research across stakeholders. These workplans complement broader research agendas in the areas of gender and social protection. 2.1 Research principles Stakeholders agree that research process and principles are important elements of the ultimate success of research in both generating rigorous, innovative knowledge – as well as affecting policy and programmatic change. To date, evaluations of cash transfer on IPV have primarily been conducted by development economists from institutions in high-income countries, dominated by quantitative methods. However, more interdisciplinary, mixed-method research, and inclusion of national researchers would strengthen the evidence base, relevance, and uptake of this work. Building on global research agenda principles (SVRI & The Equality Institute, 2020), we believe key process and methodological tenets are essential to promote in the next generation of research (Box 1). 3 Box 1: Key process and methodological tenets of future cash transfer and IPV research u Promote inter-disciplinary evaluation teams, including public health and economics— drawing on the strengths of each discipline; u Encourage mixed-method research to expand, strengthen and triangulate findings— particularly encouraging implementation research and qualitative research embedded in quantitative impact evaluations; u Include and promote national scholars from LMICs (broadly defined), both as principal or co-investigators, as well as via training opportunities for junior scholars (postdoc and graduate students), fellowships for protected writing time, and institutional collaborations; u Focus on informing the design of government and large-scale programming, for policy impact at the national level; u Pay critical attention to research ethics around collection of violence measures, including a do-no-harm approach; u Expand and innovate in measurement and analysis of IPV outcomes (e.g. maximizing disclosure of IPV and reducing response bias; improving measurement of types of IPV that are less commonly analyzed – psychological IPV, economic IPV, indicators of frequency/severity of IPV), as well as mechanisms for impact on IPV (e.g. poverty, intra- household conflict, women’s empowerment), in order to maximize learning—building on current best practice. u Pay attention to differential impacts across groups and possible adverse effects by program target group or setting (e.g. diverse household

Load more