Women empowerment and household welfare in coastal Ghana

Abstract

Meeting the sustainable development goals and improving household welfare when women are empowered. Empowering women has also been cited as critical to achieving sustainable livelihoods in the fisheries sector. However, there is rarely a measuring tool that specifically assesses women’s empowerment in fisheries activities. In this regard, this study extends the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) which is biased towards farming households and fails to account for the unique characteristics of fishing households to measure empowerment across six dimensions (production, resources, income, leadership, institution, time use) mapped to 12 indicators. This research also explored how women's empowerment can impact welfare indicators such as food insecurity and environmental poverty at the household level. Using micro-level data from five fishing communities in Ghana, the study employed the Alkire-Foster methodology to develop an empowerment index and the Probit and Fractional regression models to empirically show how empowering women correlates with food insecurity and environmental poverty, respectively. It was observed from the study that 41% of women are disempowered in fishing households. The results from intra-household empowerment showed that 72.6 % of men are disempowered. This implies that the males are less empowered than the females in the same household. Again, it was revealed that empowering women decreases the likelihood of being food insecure and environmentally poor by 37% and 13.6%, respectively. Since empowering women is essential to improving food security and ensure environmental sustainability, the study recommends that government and donor agencies should promote initiatives that strengthen the ability of women to decide on socio-economic issues at the household level.