Women's Empowerment and the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa: A Multi‐Dimensional Reassessment With Income, Regional, and Democracy Heterogeneity

Abstract

While research links women's empowerment to environmental outcomes, no study has examined this relationship using a composite sustainable development metric exclusively within Africa, where acute human development deficits coexist with the world's lowest per‐capita ecological footprints. This study fills that gap by investigating the effect of women's empowerment on the Sustainable Development Index (SDI) across 45 African nations from 2000 to 2022. Employing fixed‐effects Driscoll‐Kraay and Instrumental‐Variable Generalised Method of Moment (IV‐GMM) estimators, the analysis demonstrates that women's political empowerment—particularly parliamentary representation—significantly improves ecological efficiency, with the Women's Political Empowerment Index (WPI) raising SDI, mainly through gains in life expectancy and education. Female labour force participation yields null or negative effects. The empowerment–SDI relationship is strongest in low‐income countries, attenuates across middle‐ and high‐income groups, and civil society participation proves significant only in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Extending the analysis across democracy levels reveals that, in high‐ and medium‐democracy settings, only formal political participation indices are significant. In contrast, in low‐democracy countries the broad political empowerment index and women's civil liberties drive SDI gains, while parliamentary seats alone lose significance. These findings imply that African governments should prioritise gender quotas, protect civil liberties, and adopt empowerment strategies differentiated by income and democratic context, while steering female employment toward green sectors.