Community mills and women's empowerment in Burkina Faso

Claudio Araujo, Catherine Araujo-Bonjean () and Victor Beguerie
Additional contact information
Catherine Araujo-Bonjean: CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UCA [2017-2020] - Université Clermont Auvergne [2017-2020] - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Victor Beguerie: FERDI - Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International, CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UCA [2017-2020] - Université Clermont Auvergne [2017-2020] - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: The Multi-Functional Platforms program consists of setting up powered community mills managed by women in rural areas. By strengthening women's capacities in areas traditionally reserved for men, the program places women at the core of local development and places emphasis on the empowerment of women. To assess the impact of community mills on women's empowerment, which is by its very nature a non-observable variable with multiple dimensions, we propose an original operational framework based on Sen's capability theory. We argue that community mills participate in women's empowerment by giving them more control over the decision-making process in all spheres of their life (agency freedom), and by expanding their capability set (well-being freedom). We use structural equation modeling to explore the relationship between these two unobservable latent variables, and to assess the impact of community mills. The database is taken from a survey of 2,400 women living in 200 villages in Burkina Faso. The results are consistent with a positive impact of the program on women's empowerment. The results also confirm the validity of the approach for evaluating a potentially important, but hard-to-value, intangible outcome of a development program like individual empowerment.

Keywords: Capability; Agency; Structural equation model; Burkina Faso. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-12-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hme
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01958755
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01958755/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Community mills and women's empowerment in Burkina Faso (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01958755

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().