This paper evaluates whether microcredit programs such as the popular Grameen Bank reach the relatively poor and vulnerable in two Bangladeshi villages. It uses a unique panel dataset with monthly consumption and income data for 229 households before they received loans. We …nd that while microcredit is successful at reaching the poor, it is less successful at reaching the vulnerable. Our results also suggest that microcredit is unsuccessful at reaching the group most prone to destitution, the vulnerable poor. Our main contribution is to explicitly evaluate the targeting of an anti-poverty intervention using the e¢cient risk-sharing framework in Townsend (1994).JEL Codes: O16, I38, Q12

Trends in poverty, working through changing roles of women in income generation, have been advanced as one explanation of changing fertility in Bangladesh. This paper examines women's work patterns in two rural villages in northern Bangladesh and ®nds little evidence of increasing workforce participation, despite high contraceptive use rates. Observation of women's work patterns suggests that purdah, the practice of female seclusion, in¯uences and conditions women's decisions regarding roles they assume, and remains a dominant in¯uence in women's lives, showing little evidence of responsiveness to poverty.

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We explore young working women's perceptions of marriage and work in contemporary Egypt, when an increase in age at marriage was evident from national survey data. Both working conditions and employment opportunities declined significantly for young women even as their educational attainment increased and marriage was delayed. In-depth interviews were conducted over a 2-year period between 1998 and 2000 with 27 young women between the ages of 15 and 29 who were from relatively poor families and working in a range of salaried jobs in three locations. The qualitative data indicate that young women have high expectations in terms of marital living standards. They seek to achieve this in part by saving intensively before marriage when they work, and otherwise by ensuring substantial monetary support from their families. We conclude that rising material aspirations and family nucleation rather than change in female labor force participation drive marriage change in contemporary Egypt. The driving force behind this conclusion is that there is a reinforcement of the traditional values associated with the institution of marriage rather than its erosion.In this article, we explore values and attitudes related to the competing roles of work and marriage among young Egyptian female wage workers to shed light on the effect of recent social changes on women's lives. In the past several decades, age at marriage and female education have both increased considerably in Egypt, but female workforce participation is very low, with less than 1 in 10 women working in wage employment. We analyze qualitative data on attitudes and practices related to work and marriage among the minority of young women working for wages as a way of understanding a number of other phenomena related to gendered family roles, returns on education, and childbearing strategies. We argue that, rather than changes operating through work and related behaviors, it is important to understand the effect of globalization on consumption patterns, aspirations, and expectations.

This paper examines the impact of participation in women's savings and credit groups organized by Save the Children USA on women's empowerment, contraceptive use, and fertility in a rural area of Bangladesh. The data are drawn from a panel survey conducted in 1993, shortly before the groups were formed, and in 1995 after interventions began. This quasi-experimental design enables us to identify the characteristics of women who chose to join savings groups. The findings show that those who joined tend to be more educated and more socially independent than are women who did not. Thus, to control for selection bias, preintervention measures of empowerment are taken into consideration in the analyses of the impact of savings groups on 1995 levels of empowerment and fertility behavior. The analysis shows positive impacts of the credit program on aspirations with regard to children's education, age at marriage, and use of modern contraceptives.This material may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from the authors.

This article examines data from a study on garment-factory workers in Bangladesh to explore the implications of work for the early socialization of young women. For the first time, large numbers of young Bangladeshi women are being given an alternative to lives in which they move directly from childhood to adulthood through early marriage and childbearing. Employment creates a period of transition in contrast to the abrupt assumption of adult roles at very young ages that marriage and childbearing mandate. This longer transition creates a period of adolescence for young women working in the garment sector that is shown to have strong implications for the women's long-term reproductive health.

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