Reproducibility package for Boosting Personal or Interpersonal Initiative?: How Culturally Wise Psychological Interventions Help Reduce Poverty in Niger

Poverty is multi-dimensional, imposing not only financial constraints but also often social-psychological constraints such as diminished agency and aspirations. Through a series of field experiments, we assess the causal impacts of culturally wise interventions designed to build women’s agency on poverty reduction efforts in Niger. We moreover assess the importance of tailoring such interventions to cultural context. In Study 1, we show descriptive evidence on the more interdependent model that agency takes in this cultural context, being grounded in social harmony, respect, and collective advancement, in comparison to a more independent model grounded in personal aspirations, self-direction, and self-advancement. In Study 2, we present a secondary analysis of a policy experiment on a multi-faceted poverty reduction program, in which we assess potential psychosocial mechanisms of community and group-level social-psychological interventions on economic outcomes. We find evidence of both relational processes (enhanced social influence and social capital) and intrapersonal processes (enhanced self-efficacy and optimistic future expectations). In Study 3, we present results from an individual-level mechanism experiment embedded in the larger policy experiment. Results show that tailoring agency-boosting interventions to cultural context, specifically Interpersonal Initiative interventions attuned to cultural interdependence, led to significant effects on economic outcomes as well as on intrapersonal and relational processes. By contrast, Personal Initiative interventions grounded in cultural independence, more common in Western contexts, showed impacts on intrapersonal processes but not on relational processes nor economic outcomes. Together, these results reveal how culturally wise interventions designed to build women’s agency can contribute to efforts to combat extreme poverty.