ABSTRACT

The goal of the study is to investigate how women’s empowerment affects mothers and children’s well-being after accounting for the role of social protection, particularly cash transfers. Theoretically, the study extends the collective household model to integrate the role of cash transfers, which is empirically explored using the PDHS 2017-18 data. The study found that, empowered women have more control over the resources, which motivates them to make decisions that are good for the family and their own health. According to the study, women’s empowerment has a favorable impact on the use of maternal; health services, children health, children schooling and intimate partner violence. Women’ attitude towards health, her age, household size, exposure to media, wealth, and ease of access are favorably connected with maternal health care. In case of children health; child size at birth, breast feeding, mother’s use of antenatal care, sex of household head, location of household and wealth status are the contributing factors. Model for child schooling reveal that mother and father education has a favorable impact on child enrollment. The educational attainment level of household head, and wealth among other things, is important. Finally, women’s own education, employment before marriage, and her husband’s alcohol use were found positively associated with the incidence of intimate partner violence. But, husband’s education and employment is inversely related to the prevalence of violence.

Finally, according to the findings, cash transfers shows promising effect in all the cases i.e., maternal health, child health, child schooling and intimate partner violence.