A major research project taking place in the Mangochi District of Southern Malawi is shedding light on the challenging tightrope ultra-poor mothers walk between earning a living and raising healthy children. The study, led by development economist and PSTC trainee Moritz Poll, in collaboration with fellow economist and Washington University in St. Louis Ph.D. student Hyun Soo Suh, is a rigorous attempt to understand how poverty-fighting programs impact not just a mother’s income, but also her children’s well-being and development, as well as the effect these programs have on attitudes around family planning.

Female Micro-Entrepreneurship and Child Development is a collaboration between nonprofit Yamba Malawi and Brown University that is targeted at ultra-poor mothers with young children. It offers a comprehensive "poverty graduation" package designed to launch women into sustainable micro-businesses and provides business training, a cash grant to start an enterprise, and ongoing one-on-one coaching. Crucially, it also includes a key innovation: parenting classes on nutrition, child health and early learning, as well as support for local childcare centers. This element was included specifically to ensure that the benefits of the program reach the child generation and to free mothers from their overwhelming and largely unshared childcare responsibilities, allowing them the time needed to build a successful business.

“Malnourishment causes Malawi’s children to be some of the most underweight and shortest in the world, inflicting lifelong, irreparable damages and making Malawi one of the most growth-stunted countries on Earth. When we first started measuring these children’s development in areas other than height and weight, we were surprised to find that this extends to other measures of early childhood development: Children are about as far behind their peers in cognitive function, motor skills, or socio-emotional development as they are behind on height and weight,” Moritz explains. 

Early findings from the first 600 participants and a randomly selected control group confirmed the program’s success in its primary goal: the women are generating more income, successfully replicating economic improvements seen in similar programs worldwide. Even more promising are the short-term results for the children, showing sizable improvements in their cognitive development and higher school attendance. The intervention also led to higher parental investments in food and clothing. 

“About one year into the program, we have seen food security and nutritional diversity improve, but we are not yet seeing any impacts on the height or weight of children. On the other hand, we are already finding meaningful impacts on these children’s cognitive function and socio-emotional development,” Moritz says.

However, the research revealed a complex and unexpected social side effect. While the mothers’ economic situations improved, the program had only a modest effect on their empowerment—their authority in household decision-making only increased for consumption and children’s education. But the biggest surprise involves family planning. The research suggests that greater financial stability, paradoxically, may be strengthening existing social norms around fertility, leading to an increase in pregnancies and heightened pressure from spouses against birth control.

The importance of this study lies in its use of deep, detailed data collection. By tracking everything from daily activities to child development scores, the researchers are gaining crucial insight into the multifarious relationship between female labor and child welfare. For policymakers across the globe, the final results will be vital. This research offers a potential roadmap for designing effective poverty interventions that not only lift ultra-poor women out of destitution and give them economic independence, but that also ensure that the intergenerational cycle of poverty is broken.

Generous funding from the Weiss Fund, the National Science Foundation, the Dovetail Foundation, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, UK Government International Development funding, the Livelihood Impact Fund, the Gates Foundation, Innovations for Poverty Action, as well as the Bravo Center, Population Studies and Training Center, Watson Institute, and Nelson Center at Brown University is gratefully acknowledged by the researchers.