Female Micro-Entrepreneurship and Child Development

Andrew Foster, Moritz Poll and Hyun Soo Suh

No 35710, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Ultra-poor graduation programs (UPG) reliably reduce extreme poverty among adult recipients, yet their intergenerational effects on children remain largely undocumented. We study a child-focused UPG in rural Malawi that augments the standard graduation bundle with early childhood development (ECD) training, targeting mothers with young children in a population that is both severely stunted and approximately 1 SD behind international benchmarks on cognitive and non-cognitive development. In an RCT of 1,872 households, we show that the intervention raises child development by 0.16 to 0.26 SD within one year but has no significant effects on anthropometrics. Behind the impacts is a broad shift in parental inputs and behaviors. The results demonstrate that a child-focused anti-poverty program can generate child development gains that have not been documented in comparable programs without a child focus.

JEL-codes: I24 I25 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
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Note: CH DEV
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