Are female-headed households typically poorer than male-headed households in Nigeria?

Ayodeji Oginni, Babatunde Ahonsi and Francis Ukwuije

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2013, vol. 45, issue C, 132-137

Abstract: The first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) seeks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by year 2015. Targeting interventions to achieve this goal is important because institutions have limited resources and would thus require to know how best to deploy these resources to combat poverty. The relationship between gender and poverty may indicate a targeting strategy for poverty reduction. However, empirical evidences are quite equivocal. This study therefore sought to determine if FHHs are poorer than MHHs in Nigeria using wealth index as a poverty measure. We analysed the household data from the last Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (2008 NDHS) which is a nationally representative survey of 34,070 households in the country. Using binary logistic regression for our multivariate analysis, we found FHHs less likely to be poor than MHHs contrary to the claim in the 2008 NDHS Report. We therefore suggest that without neglecting FHHs, poverty-reduction interventions should be focussed more on MHHs which are more predominant in the country in order to reach more of the poor in the country.

Keywords: Nigeria; Female-headed households; Poverty; Male-headed households; Gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535713000784
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:soceco:v:45:y:2013:i:c:p:132-137

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2013.04.010

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().