This project develops a tool to measure female and youth empowerment in the context of Tunisia. This tool will be inspired by the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), but fitted to the Tunisian context. The WEAI is a survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector. We extend it to the youth. Our tool has been implemented through a cross-sectional survey that also contains a much elaborated employment module, so that the complex relation between empowerment and employment can be analyzed, both for women and for the youth. We further use the survey to test the impact of framing on the measurement of empowerment as well as prior awareness rising. Built-in list experiments will be used to measure additional phenomena including women’s and youths’ support for violent extremism. Finally, implicit association tests are run to explore men and women’s attitudes towards women’s empowerment.

The survey has been conducted with the help of BJKA, a survey institute based in Tunis, in urban and rural areas using a randomized multi-stage sampling design. The survey has been completed in December 2017. The data is currently analyzed. First results will be published in April 2018.

The project is funded by the ILO Fund for Evaluation in Employment.

The project is based at the University of Passau. Cooperation Partners are the Universities of Tunis (Sofiane Ghali) and Sfax (Sami Zouari) and UNU-MERIT in Maastricht (Micheline Goedhuys, Aline Meysonnat and Eleonora Nillesen). At Passau University the project involves Michael Grimm and Ann-Kristin Reitmann (both Chair of Development Economics, School of Business, Economics and Information Systems).

First project findings are published in the following report "Women’s and Youth Empowerment in Rural Tunisia - An assessment using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI)".

A summary of the findings by UNU-Merit can be found here. 

Based on the collected data, two further articles have been published:

E. Nillesen, M. Grimm, M. Goedhuys, A.-K. Reitmann and A. Meysonnat (2020), On the Malleability of Gender Attitudes: Evidence from Implicit and Explicit Measures in Tunisia. Forthcoming in World Development. (An earlier version is available as IZA Working Paper No. 12471).

A.-K. Reitmann, M. Goedhuys, M. Grimm, E. Nillesen (2020), Gender attitudes in the Arab region – the role of framing and priming effects. Journal of Economic Psychology.80: 1-18. (An earlier version is available as UNU-MERIT working paper, #2019-027).