The Origins of Women’s Economic and Political Participation in Africa, Chinemelu Okafor

Women's economic participation is not uniform across the world. Africa continues to stand out in its singular ability to engage women in the economy both in terms of levels of female labor force participation and heterogeneity. While the dominant explanation for women's (dis) empowerment elsewhere points to the historical introduction of the plough, Africa had nearly no exposure to plough technologies and instead was primarily characterized by hoe-farming. Still, African ethnic groups exhibited substantial historical variation in the extent to which women played a dominant role in agriculture. What, then, explains the origins of women's economic participation across Africa? I argue that whether contemporary African women participate in the labor force is in part driven by differences in historical norms developed from ethnic groups’ gendered farming practices which were themselves driven by tasks necessary for crop cultivation. In the absence of plough machinery, societies considered reaping men's tasks and considered sowing and weeding women's tasks. This gendered division of tasks effectively gave rise to distinctly men’s and women’s crops across the continent. To test this, I link pre-colonial ethnic group data on whether women worked more (or only) in agriculture to gendered folklore motifs data, present-day female labor force participation data and data on political participation across the continent. I instrument for women’s historical role in agriculture using exogenous grid cell-level crop suitability data and the historical crop classification of men’s and women’s crops established by social anthropologist Hermann Baumann. I find empirical evidence that women’s historical participation in the economy, amongst societies more suitable for women’s crops, predicts women’s participation in the economy and household decision-making autonomy. The results also suggest that ethnic groups in areas more suitable for women's crops exhibit fewer gender motifs depicting female domesticity, female submission, and male violence in their historical folklore. Furthermore, I find preliminary evidence that these women also engage more in informal politics.

Funding: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

External Presentations: American Political Science Association Annual Conference (2026); PhD Excellence Initiative Conference at Stanford University (2026).