Empowering Women through Workfare and Financial Inclusion in India

Can improving women’s access to workfare boost their labor force participation and economic agency? In collaboration with government and NGO partners, Inclusion Economics is testing at-scale the impact of video-based training combined with government-led efforts to link women’s bank accounts to workfare payment on their empowerment and economic participation.

India has one of the world’s lowest female labor force participation rates - at 41.7% compared to 78.8% for men - a persistent gap that constrains economic growth and limits women’s autonomy.

The Government of India’s flagship workfare program, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), was designed in part to address these challenges. By guaranteeing 100 days of paid work annually to rural households and incorporating gender-sensitive features—such as equal wages for men and women and minimum quotas for female participation—MGNREGS has the potential to serve as a powerful on-ramp to women’s paid employment. Yet in practice, administrative and informational barriers prevent millions of women from accessing these benefits. Many women remain unaware of their right to request work, and even those who try face logistical hurdles, such as complex administrative procedures, challenges using digital payment systems, data errors, limited literacy, and low confidence when interacting with local officials, which prevent them from accessing wages and participating fully in the program.

India’s transition to the Aadhaar-Based Payment System (ABPS), which facilitates digital transfers to biometric ID-linked citizen bank accounts, represents a major advance in digital public infrastructure aimed at improving transparency, reducing leakage, and expanding financial inclusion. Yet this system has not systematically incorporated a gender lens to ensure women can equitably navigate it and capitalize on its potential.

Since 2023, a team at Inclusion Economics has been collaborating with a local NGO and government counterparts to test an innovative, two-pronged intervention addressing these challenges. The project facilitates women's access to MGNREGS through account linking —ABPS payment system to enable direct wage deposits on their own account—and provides standardized, video-based empowerment training that follows the story of Jamni, a woman who learns how to demand work, access her entitlements, and act collectively with peers, with the goal of building knowledge, confidence, and agency.

Building on prior research showing that depositing MGNREGS wages into women's own bank accounts can meaningfully strengthen their financial autonomy and labor force participation , the Women's Initiative for Socio-Economic Empowerment (WISE) examines how to deliver this impact at scale in India’s updated financial ecosystem.

The project implements a large randomized controlled trial across 27% of rural communities in Madhya Pradesh, with the goal of training and/or digitally linking the accounts of 450,000 women by mid-2026. WISE is designed to generate actionable evidence on three core questions: Can simplifying access to digital payments and providing empowerment training increase women's labor force participation and control over earned income? How do different training delivery models—via an NGO versus the government—compare in effectiveness, cost and scalability? And when women’s economic participation increases at scale, do broader labor market dynamics and gender norms begin to shift at the community level?

We are currently raising resources to enable a comprehensive evaluation of longer-term program effects and community-wide impacts. If you are interested in supporting this work, please contact Deanna Ford, Managing Director of Yale Inclusion Economics, at deanna.ford@yale.edu.