High fertility rates remain a binding constraint on women's labor market participation in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper asks whether digital infrastructure can reduce this constraint. Exploiting the staggered rollout of fiber optic backbone nodes following Kenya's 2009 submarine cable arrival, I construct a woman-by-year panel from Demographic and Health Survey birth histories and define treatment as residing within 10 kilometers of an active node. Two-way fixed effects and Callaway-Sant'Anna (2021) estimates show that broadband exposure reduces the likelihood of giving birth by 0.7–1.0 percentage points and widens birth spacing. Node arrival shifts women into non-agricultural employment, raising the opportunity cost of childbearing through both the labor market and information channels. Instrumental variable estimates using road network proximity confirm robustness to endogenous placement. Digital infrastructure reduces barriers to women's economic participation.

Physical capital recovers from war, but human capital does not. We study whether adolescent human capital recovers after conflict, using five rounds of a panel following 6,700 Ethiopian adolescents from 2017 to 2025 linked to geolocated conflict data. Exploiting variation in the timing of first exposure to conflict in a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that school enrollment falls and does not recover, while adolescent paid work rises. Depression increases, and trust in adults declines. Suggestive evidence points to a coping mechanism: conflict raises household food insecurity, families turn to adolescent labor, and adolescents who leave school do not return once the violence ends. Reconstruction that restores physical capital alone will not restore schooling.

Education outcomes have improved globally over the past decade, yet vast inequalities remain, with the current era of polycrisis threatening to overturn past gains. For those born into disadvantage, access to education and employment often remains out of reach, with inequality of opportunity from birth determining adult outcomes. This paper adds to the inequality of opportunity literature using rich mixed-methods longitudinal data collected with more than 7,000 adolescents surveyed as part of the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) study in Ethiopia. The novel aspect of our paper is that we use characteristics that are previously unavailable to other studies on the topic – namely, disability and gender – along with the more commonly used circumstances related to family background (parental education and region of birth). Our findings show that the contribution of gender and disability to overall inequality of opportunity is small and pales in comparison to parental education and birth region. Using decomposition tools from the inequality of opportunity literature, we find that the partial contribution of parental education is at least an order of magnitude larger than that of gender and disability combined. In fact, we find that in the context of the study areas, secondary or higher education of at least one parent is highly protective of outcomes, making up for other disadvantages. Identifying the factors that drive inequality of opportunity presents an opportunity for policymakers to make simple, cost-effective diagnostic and treatment interventions.

Adolescence is a window for interventions to improve current and longer-term well-being, yet it is also a time when girls face an array of restrictive gender norms, reinforced by peers, families, communities and institutions. Without norms change at each of these levels, it may be difficult to improve girls' outcomes in a sustainable way. This study analyzes data from a cluster randomized controlled trial in Ethiopia to evaluate near-term impacts of multi-level adolescent-centric interventions aimed at gender norms transformation—layered to include girls, boys, their families and communities—on the empowerment of approximately 2,300 young adolescent girls (10-14). We find that gender-focused programming can improve a broad range of girls' capabilities after one year, though we don't detect sustained improvements after an additional 1-2 years of follow-up. In locations where there is strong community-level support and where interventions are implemented well, there are improvements in girls' capabilities as a result of the most comprehensive programming, and these improvements are more wide-ranging, more sustainable (at least up to 2.5 years). Impacts are weaker (and sometimes even negative) where support and implementation are less consistent, suggesting the need for tailored and well-monitored implementation approaches in different contexts.