Gender and Generational Consequences of a Health and Family Planning Program: A Quasi Experiment in Matlab, Bangladesh

Welfare programs exert direct and indirect effects by gender and generation. They may target directly child health, education, family planning, and reproductive health, among other things, and affect other interdependent family outcomes of social importance. For example, improving understanding of and access to birth control may help women reduce their fertility, improve their health, contribute to the health and education of their children, allow women to allocate more time to activities other than childcare, which adds to their market productivity, and to accumulate more household wealth to smooth and sustain their level of consumption into old age. Program evaluation studies are rarely able to assess long term lifecycle effects of such programs on those who are provided local access to subsidized services. In this paper, I explore, with the aid of a quasi social experiment in Matlab, Bangladesh of a relatively long duration or two decades, the association between a Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning (MCH-FP) Program on some of the program’s many objectives, which have different consequences by gender and generation, and may spill over beyond the explicit objectives of the program and may foster development. Understanding how programs modify the magnitude and distribution of such transfers within the family may help design more effective and equitable programs to alleviate current and future poverty.