Impact of Women Empowerment on Poverty Reduction: Empirical Evidence from Nigeria and Ivory Coast

Abstract

Poverty is one of the major causes of many social vices in less developed countries, which increasingly affecting vulnerable class in the society, particularly women. This study examines the impact of women empowerment on poverty reduction in Africa using time series panel data across Nigeria and Ivory Coast covering 2011 to 2021. The study used Livin, Lin and Chu (LLC) panel unit root test and found that all the variables are stationary at level and Pedroni test of cointegration confirmed the long run relationship among the variables. The causality result showed evidence of bi-directional causality running from poverty rate to multidimensional women empowerment and poverty rate and unemployment. Lastly, the study recommends that more importance should be attached to women empowerment in order to reduce the poverty rate across the countries of the study.