Women’s economic empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa: Capturing within-country heterogeneity using the DBS method

Women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries is a topic of great interest, which DHS data nowadays permit to examine. Analyses conducted at country or group level, however, frequently use synthetic indicators that transform complex realities into a single measure (such as a sum or an average), which may oversimplify reality, and hide internal heterogeneity. This limitation may be overcome by the use of the advanced version of the Distance Between Strata (DBS) method that we introduce here. This technique, first proposed in 2016, focuses on similarities between country (or group) pairs, and translates them into a series of measures of distance, from each country to any other. Until now, DBS has been applied only to cultural or opinion data in developed countries: its use in a new context (SSA, between 2010 and 2018) and on a new type of data (regarding WEE) is in itself an innovation. More important, however, is the methodological novelty: the creation of “ideal types”, i.e. hypothetical countries with predefined characteristics, positive or negative. These act as “poles” in a graph, and guide the interpretation of the position of actual countries: which of them have the best and worst performances, or time trend, and in what domain: e.g. education, participation in the labour market, and individual decision power. The advantages and limitations of the approach are extensively discussed in the final sections of the paper.