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

Women’s empowerment remains an important commitment globally. However, women’s economic and political participation is not uniform across the world. Africa continues to stand out in its singular ability to engage women in the economy and in politics. What explains this enduring success? While a prominent explanation for women’s (dis) empowerment points to the historical introduction of new economic technologies (i.e., the plough), Africa had nearly no exposure to plough technologies historically. To directly address this gap in knowledge, I test Ester Boserup’s Land-to-Man Hypothesis, which suggests that, in societies that engaged in extensive (shifting) agriculture, due to the low-productivity of the soil and low population density, there developed a female farming system where the input of labor per family in subsistence farming could be kept at lower levels, thus making it possible for African villagers to adopt a system with less labor input per unit of agricultural output and leave most of the farming work to women (Boserup, 1970). To explore the enduring influence of historical female economic participation on contemporary economic participation and informal political participation, I use data on traditional agricultural practices from Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas of pre-colonial societal characteristics. To causally identify this persistence, I exploit variation in the historical agro-ecological suitability of the environment for growing less labor-intensive crops which benefit the practice of extensive agriculture and the adoption of a female farming system. To explore mechanisms of persistence using data from the World Bank General Household Survey, I will test whether cultural rules that restrict men’s access to less labor intensive crops inform these results, as well as the cultural practices of bride price and polygyny using data from the Demographic and Health Survey. Finally, using Afrobarometer data I hypothesize that in societies with a historical female farming system women are more engaged in informal politics suggesting that the appropriate role of women in the economy is also one that continues to be negotiated through political participation.