Women's Empowerment and Food Security in Cameroon

ABSTRACT:The zero-hunger objective of the Sustainable Development Goals is still far from reach as food insecurity continues to be a problem. Literature largely associates women empowerment with food security but its empirical evidence is still sparse, especially in Cameroon. To fill this gap, the study investigates the effect of women empowerment on food security in Cameroon. The methodology employed eight indicators of women empowerment drawn from the Cameroon Consumption Household Survey IV to construct an index of women empowerment using the Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Likewise, Household Food Insecurity Access Scale is used in combination with other food security measures to construct a composite index of food security. The study then employs two stage least square instrumental variable model for analysis. Pre-estimation and post-estimation tests were employed for robustness; such as the Anderson canon LR Statistics to test for the strength of the instruments used and the endogeneity test to validate the need for the instrumental variable regression. The key result posits that women empowerment has a positive and significant effect on food security. A unit increase in women empowerment increases food security by 0.474 and it is significant at 5% significant level. This aligns with apriori expectation. Furthermore, household size, the square of household size, age and the square of age are all not significant. Though, household size and age are negative while their squares are positive. Also, the results show that households located in urban areas are significantly more food secure than those in rural areas at a 1% level of significance. Respondents who were married had significantly lower food security than the unmarried and Christian women had significantly lower food security than their counterparts. The study recommends that there is need to set up programs and institutions that empower women in all aspects so as to ensure food security consequently. Furthermore, the empowerment of women should be incorporated in food poverty reduction strategies that touches the household directly. Conclusively, the study insinuates a positive relationship between women empowerment and food security, therefore all women empowerment measures must be promoted and institutionalized if food security must be improved.