Analysis of Women Empowerment in Rural Nigeria: A Multidimensional Approach
This study assessed the empowerment status of women in Rural Nigeria. Following Alkire and Foster (2007) multidimensional poverty measure, we constructed the multidimensional women empowerment index across selected dimensions and indicators using the 2013 Demographic and Health Survey data (DHS). The logit regression was used to profile its determinants. The multidimensional women disempowerment index was 0.427. The study finds that when the empowerment cutoff k=2, approximately 43% of the rural women were disempowered. The education and resource dimensions had the highest relative contributions of 33.59% and 31.61% to the overall multidimensional disempowerment index. The study revealed that while age of the women, age of the household head and employment in skilled and unskilled sector significantly increase the probability of rural women’s empowerment, gender of household head, employment in agriculture and allied sector, household size, and location of rural women in the Northern region of Nigeria reduce the probability of women economic empowerment in rural Nigeria. It is recommended that efforts must be directed at these individual indicators to improve on the empowerment, inclusion and agency of rural women especially in planning intervention strategies. This should be backed up with enforcement of policies that will ensure rural women enjoy the same potentials, rights and privileges as men in society in order to ensure and achieve sustainable rural development.
