Women’s Empowerment and Family Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Ethiopia, Kenia and Nigeria.

Aurora Angeli , Università di Bologna
Silvana Salvini, University of Florence

TITLE: Women’s Empowerment and Family Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Ethiopia, Kenia and Nigeria. Authors: Aurora Angeli, University of Bologna aurora.angeli@unibo.it Silvana Salvini, University of Florence mariasilvana.salvini@unifi.it Abstract Evidence suggests that in developing countries women’s empowerment is often associated to the decline of fertility, acting also through improvement of infant survival and contraception. In this contribution, we intend to analyze the most recent and available Demographic and Health Survey data of three sub-Saharan countries, Ethiopia, Kenia and Nigeria to the aim of understanding, if any, the relationship between women’s empowerment on one side and fertility control on the other. Women’s empowerment (a multidimensional concept) is measured by an index that takes into account four aspects: (i) socio-economic status of women; (ii) decision making in the family context; (iii) attitude toward domestic violence and (iv) toward female genital cutting. Firstly, we show the difference among the different components in the three countries to understand which of them has the larger role on women’s empowerment. Secondly, we intend to study by regression techniques the use of contraception as dependent variable, the index of women’s empowerment as explicative variable and some control covariates such as age, age square, region of residence, age at marriage, number of children, number of children died in the first year of life as control factors. The results generally evidence that the higher is the level of empowerment of women the higher the propensity to use contraception, confirming our hypothesis and the literature at this proposal.

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 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy