 Headship and Poverty in AfricaCaitlin Brown and Dominique van de Walle No 531, Working Papers from Center for Global Development Abstract: With a little more care to take context and the confounding attributes that make female-headed households (FHHs) particularly prone to poverty into account, this paper argues that headship can be useful for identifying poor households in Africa. Standard welfare comparisons between FHHs and male-headed households (MHHs) have largely ignored two confounding factors: marital status (affecting access to markets and services) and heterogeneity in household demographics (with bearing on economies of scale in consumption). Both influence welfare and are correlated with gender of headship. As judged by the usual per capita welfare measures, FHHs, on average, have lower poverty rates than MHHs in Africa. However, even a modest adjustment for economies of scale in consumption changes the poverty comparisons, with FHHs faring significantly worse overall in East, Central, and Southern Africa. Marital status also matters. The households of female heads are poorer than MHHs except when the female head is married. Taking the head’s marital status and the household’s demographics into account is critical to the association between female headship and welfare outcomes. Keywords: Female-headed households; gender; poverty; economies of scale; Africa; marital status (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:531 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC. |
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