Women's economic empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from cross-national population data

Abstract

BACKGROUND Women’s economic empowerment (WEE) has attracted high-level policy interest, and is recognized as a central, cross-cutting outcome, and the cornerstone for achieving Sustainable Development Goals. However, it lacks a standardised definition and standard, measurable, and comparable indicators, and is plagued by large data gaps, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). OBJECTIVE We examine the extent of WEE in SSA. Our goal is to identify WEE country typologies explaining the variation in and contributing domains of WEE in each country. Using in we apply principal component analysis to generate a WEE based better understand contributors underlying and derive country typologies.