Changes in gender differences in household poverty in Kenya

Jared Masini Ichwara, Tabitha W. Kiriti-Ng’ang’a and Anthony Wambugu

Cogent Economics & Finance, 2023, vol. 11, issue 1, 2191455

Abstract: Gender poverty differences in households are likely to affect female-headed households more than male-headed households. This paper examined the evolution of the gender poverty rate gap and identified the factors that underlie differences in poverty rates between female-headed households and male-headed households using the most recent representative household surveys conducted by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in 2005/06 and 2015/16. An extended Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis with nonlinear regression was performed. The findings indicate that poverty rates for female-headed households and male-headed households declined from 38.56 to 32.73% in 2005/06 to 30.23 and 26.04% in 2015/16, respectively. Although female-headed households (1.12) have a higher chance of falling into poverty than male-headed households (0.95), the decline in the poverty rate was higher for female-headed households (8.33%) than for male-headed households (6.69%). Therefore, the results do not support the feminization of poverty hypothesis in Kenya. Factors that have bridged the gender poverty gap include cash transfers that explain 11.02% of the gaps, literacy (53.97%), university education (10.39%), secondary education (40.84%), employment in public and private sectors (26.66%) and business employment (10.58%). Recommended policies include the implementation of the gender policy and affirmative action, enhancing literacy levels, and secondary and university enrolment.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/23322039.2023.2191455 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:oaefxx:v:11:y:2023:i:1:p:2191455

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/OAEF20

DOI: 10.1080/23322039.2023.2191455

Access Statistics for this article

Cogent Economics & Finance is currently edited by Steve Cook, Caroline Elliott, David McMillan, Duncan Watson and Xibin Zhang

More articles in Cogent Economics & Finance from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().