Our Findings
In addition to organizing Sub-Saharan African countries into sub-regions, we found it important to divide our analysis of regional trends in women’s household decision-making rights and capabilities into sub-categories. Here, we present our findings from a legal-rights perspective, a demographic perspective, and a beliefs-based perspective. Legal-rights analysis involves dataset indicators that have to do with specific legal policies in each country. Demographic trends relate mainly to women’s rates and age of first marriage over time. Finally, beliefs-based indicators have to do with women’s thoughts on their own household rights, divisions of household responsibilities, and women’s agency around healthcare, purchasing, and mobility. We dive into overall trends mapped through various data visualizations and then discuss reasons for the regional variation and the importance of this.
Legal Rights
To obtain an overall understanding of variation in women’s household legal rights across Sub-Saharan Africa, we analyze four primary indicators:
(1) Whether a woman can be head of household in the same way as a man or not.
(2) Whether or not a woman can obtain a judgment of divorce.
(3) Whether or not a woman can remarry.
(4) Whether or not there is a legal provision in the country that requires a married woman to obey her husband.
Data Visualization #1: How Long Women Have Had the Legal Right to be Head of Household in Sub-Saharan Africa, Displayed Regionally
This Gantt chart examines women’s right to be head of household over time from 1970 to 2023 and is organized regionally to show variation in sub-regional trends. Of the five regions, the Sahel and the Congo Basin show limited progress to this end. In the Sahel, only one country, Gambia, allows women the right to be head of household. Meanwhile, in the Congo Basin, three countries currently allow this right: Gabon, Rwanda, and Equatorial Guinea. However, only Equatorial Guinea has allowed women this right since 1970. Gabon and Rwanda legalized women’s place as head of household in 2021 and 2017, respectively. Meanwhile, nearly all countries in the Guinea Region, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa currently allow women the legal right to be head of household in the same way as a man. Half of the countries in the Guinea Region have had this right established since 1990, and Guinea Bissau is a regional outlier as the only state currently without it. Similarly, in Southern Africa, only Eswatini does not currently have this right. In Eastern Africa, four of the seven countries have had the right since 1970, the first year for which we have data. Here, Somalia is a regional outlier as the only country without the right. Interestingly, though, some geographical sources list Somalia within the Sahel region, due to its similar climate and climate-related challenges, which will be expanded upon in the overall analysis (Alliance Sahel). Already, it is clear that sub-regional variation is significant.
Data Visualization #6: Women’s Legal Right to Divorce and Remarry in Eastern Africa (Number of Years between 1970 – 2023)
Next, the two related indicators of whether women have the legal right to obtain a judgment of divorce and whether they can remarry are presented here in the form of five double-bar charts–one for each sub-region. Within each bar chart, the countries are listed, as well one bar for the number of years between 1970 and 2023 that women were able to obtain a judgment of divorce and another for the number of years they had the legal right to remarry. Interestingly, some regions feature only one right over the other. For example, in the Congo Basin, all countries except Equatorial Guinea allow women the right to divorce, but only two–the Central African Republic and Rwanda (for 25 years and 3 years, respectively) have legalized women’s right to remarry. Across the board, the right to divorce is much more common than the right to remarry, save for in Zambia and Zimbabwe (Southern Africa) and Uganda (Eastern Africa). In considering rights across various regions, women’s ability to divorce and remarry is most limited in the Sahel, where only three countries–Chad, Mali, and Senegal–grant women this right, and none allow for remarriage. Outside of the Sahel, only three countries do not grant women either of these rights. These are Equatorial Guinea (Guinea Region), Somalia (Eastern Africa), and Eswatini (Southern Africa).
Data Visualization #7: Women’s Legal Right to Not Obey their Husbands in Sub-Saharan Africa, Organized by Region
This indicator, whether or not there exists a legal provision within each state requiring a married woman to obey her husband, reveals stark variation on a regional and country level. This indicator is represented here with a Gantt chart, showing change over time in this type of legislation and its prominence in each sub-region. It is similar to the previous Gantt chart covering women’s ability to be head of household in that it too examines data from 1970 to 2023 and is organized regionally to show variation in sub-regional trends. Nearly every country in which it is true that the law is free of legal provisions requiring a married woman to obey her husband, has had this be the case since 1970, the first year of collection represented in the data set. The reverse is true as well. Every country in which this is not the case has never had it be the case. Three exceptions exist in the Congo Basin: Gabon (Congo Basin), in which legal provisions forcing women’s obedience in the household were abolished in 2021, Burundi (Congo Basin), in which this change occurred in 1993, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo Basin), which had such laws during the period from 1988 to 2017. Two exceptions exist in Eastern Africa: Eritrea and Ethiopia, where such laws were abolished in 1992 and 2001, respectively. Across all regions, the Sahel features the largest proportion of countries without the right of women to not have to obey their husbands, with Mali, Mauritania and Sudan representing 43% of the countries. Meanwhile, in the Congo Basin, only one country does not currently have this right–Equatorial Guinea, but the sub-region has seen progress over time. Eastern Africa has also seen progress to where no countries have legal provisions requiring women’s obedience. In the Guinea Region and Southern Africa, meanwhile, no country represented has ever had these rights-limiting laws.
Demographic Trends
Marriage has been and continues to be a major part of many women’s lives, whether married or not. We specifically focus on child marriage as it is a form of abuse and a lack of rights for women. We analyze two indicators for this:
(1) The singulate mean age at first marriage.
(2) The percentage of women aged 20 to 24 that were married before 18.
Data Visualization #8: Women’s Mean Age at First Marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa
This graph plots the singulate mean age at first marriage (SMAM) for women in each sub-region from 1970 to 2018, showing overall increases across sub-regions. This measure is calculated by taking the percentage of women aged 40-45 that are married and extrapolating their mean age at first marriage. While it provides a somewhat inaccurate measure, it doesn’t require data collectors to investigate every marriage to figure out the women’s age at first marriage, which is a costly process. This is associated with the creation of more effective marriage legislation throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and the penetration of progressive ideas about gender roles and norms into rural areas, which serve as strongholds of traditions. Unfortunately, the data for this indicator is extremely sparse, with many countries missing data for many years; as discussed previously, this is caused by many countries’ lack of cooperation with independent research organizations due to the reign of authoritarian and colonial governments. To combat this and make a visualization that still provides insight, we grouped the countries by sub-region to account for the scarcity of data for each country. The Sahel sub-region saw the least growth and after 1990, had the lowest SMAM. Guinea saw the highest growth and had the second highest SMAM by 2018 when it was initially the lowest in 1970.
Data Visualization #9: Women’s Mean Age at First Marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa – 2010
This map shows the same indicator as the above line graph and highlights the gaps in the data over the years, even when averaging the existing data for countries in each sub-region.
Data Visualization #10: Percentage of Women Aged 20-24 Married Before 18 in Sub-Saharan Africa
The indicator plotted here is the percentage of women aged 20 to 24 who were married before 18; it is a direct measure of the rate of child marriage in each sub-region. Unlike the SMAM, this one is based on questionnaire responses and doesn’t suffer from the same level of inaccuracy as an extrapolated measure. However, this indicator suffers from the same paucity of data from the lack of cooperation from colonial and authoritarian governments with independent research organizations as SMAM. Thus, we analyze the differences between sub-regions rather than between countries. Sahel saw the greatest decrease over the three decades, but still remains the sub-region with the highest rate of child marriage. Guinea also saw a significant decrease and became the sub-region with the second-lowest child marriage rate when it was initially the second-highest one. Every sub-region sees a decrease in the percentage of women married before 18, showing the reduction of child marriage rates, likely influenced by improving marriage legislation and the dissemination of progressive ideas about gender norms and behavior throughout the region.
Beliefs
This section is intended to analyze how gender affects society’s view of what daily activities and decisions a person can and should be involved in. It addresses seven main indicators:
(1) Belief that a husband is justified in beating his wife
(2) Belief that a wife is justified in refusing sex with her husband
(3) Women participating in decision of what food to cook daily
(4) Women participating in decision of visits to family, relatives, and friends
(5) Women participating in making daily purchase decisions
(6) Women participating in making major household purchase decisions
(7) Women participating decisions about their own health care.
Data Visualization #11: Women’s Beliefs About and Participation In Household Matters (%)
Every indicator in the beliefs-based perspective category is addressed in this bar graph. Each bar represents the average percentage of women–across the countries in the given region–for which the indicator applies. The graph does include all data from 1970, so it is not a representation of changing perspectives over time so much as it is a comparison across regions to see in which region women tend to have the most autonomy. According to the data presented in this graph, the Sahel region allows women the least autonomy, with the highest percentage of women who believe their husband is justified in beating them (at 60%) and the lowest percentage in all other indicators–which are all indicators where higher percentages would signal more autonomy. As a matter of fact, for the indicators where the Sahel is ranked the lowest, the gap between their average and the next closest region is fairly significant–above 23 percentage points for almost every one of those indicators. Meanwhile, the factors addressing women’s participation in different decisions had very little variation among the Guinea, Congo Basin, Eastern, and Southern African regions–under 15 percentage points in most cases. Overall, the graph would indicate that women in the Southern African region have the most autonomy, with the highest percentage of women participating in decisions about purchases, health care, and making visits to people outside of the household (although, as previously mentioned, the variation among the top four regions was not great in these categories). They ranked near the top in participating in decisions about what food to cook and in believing a wife is justified in refusing sex with her husband, while having the lowest percentage of women who believe a husband is justified in beating his wife.
In regards to our research question, this visualization addresses how gender inequality in societal norms and decision-making varies across space. The Sahel clearly separates itself from the other regions with women having notably less say in every-day household activities. The indicators addressing a husband beating his wife and a wife refusing sex with her husband are closely tied to intimate partner violence, which is known to affect women in sub-Saharan Africa to a greater extent than women in other parts of the world. According to “Sharing responsibility through joint decision making and implications for intimate-partner violence: Evidence from 12 sub-saharan African countries,” couples that report making joint decisions have a lower rate of intimate partner violence, compared to couples where the husband is reported as making all of the decisions. Consequently, it makes sense that the regions with a larger percentage of women participating in decision-making have fewer women who believe their husband is justified in beating them and more who feel it is acceptable to refuse sex.
