MAISHA — Gender-Transformative Curriculum in Microfinance Groups, Mwanza, Tanzania

MAISHA is a 10-session participatory gender-training curriculum, modelled on South Africa's IMAGE study, delivered to women meeting weekly in group-based microfinance schemes in Mwanza, north-western Tanzania. Sessions cover gender norms, communication, financial decision-making and responses to intimate partner violence (IPV), and were developed with the Tanzanian government and local partners.
Researchers ran two parallel cluster-randomised controlled trials to isolate the curriculum's effect from the microfinance context itself: CRT01 delivered MAISHA inside 66 pre-existing microfinance groups (1,049 women), and CRT02 delivered the identical curriculum inside 66 newly formed neighbourhood groups with no microfinance component (1,265 women). Published in The Lancet Global Health (Kapiga et al., 2019) and analysed further in PLOS Global Public Health (2023), the trials measured past-year physical IPV around 29 months after randomisation.
The results were split: in the microfinance-linked groups, MAISHA significantly reduced past-year physical IPV (adjusted OR 0.63, 95% CI 0.41–0.98). In the standalone neighbourhood groups, the identical curriculum had no measurable effect (adjusted OR 0.98, 95% CI 0.72–1.33). The comparison is a rare, directly-tested demonstration that a gender-transformative curriculum's protective effect can depend on being paired with an economic-empowerment structure, rather than working as a stand-alone communication intervention.

Read the full analysis: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT02592252