UC Davis

This project aims to improve our basic understanding of women’s empowerment and develop a multi-component index that tracks empowerment over time and across space in sub-Saharan Africa. We first developed the Female Empowerment Index (FEMI) to track six domains of women’s empowerment (Intimate Partner Violence, Access to Family Planning, Reproductive Healthcare, Employment, Education, and Decision-Making) at the sub-national level and applied it to Nigeria for five years to test its conceptual merit. We found clear geographic patterns in empowerment across space and time. Next, we used all available data across sub-Saharan Africa to calculate FEMI and its components for the years 1995, 2005, and 2015. We found that the median score increased by 0.09. However, there was considerable variation both within and between countries. We found a coastal-inland and north-south gradient within all domains other than employment. We also discovered worsening inequality within education and employment, and no progress in family planning access in northern SSA. Finally, we assessed potential economic, environmental, and social markers for their ability to accurately predict women’s empowerment, based on FEMI scores in 2015. We tested all first-level administrative subdivisions in SSA as a result of travel time to the nearest city, distance to the nearest coastline, GDP per capita (PPP), population density, annual temperature, and rainfall. Models were made for the continent and four subregions (North/Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern). Only the North/Western and Eastern regions were different from the null model. Population density was consistently one of the most important predictors and showed a strong positive effect on women’s empowerment even at relatively low densities, with distance to the coast being the second most important factor. Understanding the past and current status of women’s empowerment and some of its predictors may help push forward improved intervention targeted and an understanding of the factors underlying empowerment.