Community organizations and associated social capital can play important roles in economic development especially when traditional market and/or state based mechanisms are weak. While community-led interventions have been found to be important factor in economic and social development, little is known how formation of community development groups can interact with local political leaders. In this paper we will take advantage of a social experiment to shed light on empowerment of female local political leaders through an awareness building exercise and formation of women-centric community development groups. Civic engagements and knowledge building are positively associated with social development (as we show in this paper). Such factors can make a political leader more accountable and ensure delivery of socially desirable goods and services. We show that this allows the female local government members (FLGMs) to interact with community women groups (CWGs) to prioritize sanitation and hygiene related issues (the issues that were addressed in the interventions) compared to the FLGMs in the control areas. FLGMs receiving treatment are also more likely to have a “plan” to address sanitation and hygiene issues and are more likely to work with CWGs to make such plans. We also investigated other actors (namely, volunteer groups and general public) and interaction between those actors and the FLGMs. We found a much weaker causal links in those cases. Hence, we conclude that our results are not spurious and causal interpretations between the interventions and management outcomes are valid. To the best of our knowledge this is probably the first effort to use such framework to understand organizational and management capacities of local political leaders.