African Women Vulnerability Index: Focus on Rural Women

In this paper, we develop a new index labelled the African Women Vulnerability Index (AWVI) with a focus on rural women using Round 7 of the Afrobarometer Survey. The AWVI comprises 59 indicators in six dimensions, namely: safety, empowerment, health, education, economic prosperity, and digitalisation. Our findings show that: (i) Botswana performs best while women in Guinea and Sudan are the most vulnerable. Indeed, Mauritius appears as a good example in some dimensions such as health and digitalisation. (ii) Except for the dimension of digitalisation, rural women's vulnerabilities in other dimensions are very close to those at the national level. (iii) National vulnerability trends strongly explain rural women's vulnerability especially for the economic, empowerment, and health dimensions.

Automated summary

In this paper, a new index called the African Women Vulnerability Index (AWVI) is developed to assess the vulnerability of rural women in Africa. The AWVI consists of 59 indicators in six dimensions, including safety, empowerment, health, education, economic prosperity, and digitalisation. The study finds that Botswana performs the best, while women in Guinea and Sudan experience the highest level of vulnerability. Moreover, the vulnerability of rural women in most dimensions is similar to that of women at the national level, except for digitalisation. National vulnerability trends significantly impact the vulnerability of rural women, particularly in the economic, empowerment, and health dimensions.