Abstract:
There is a fast rising acknowledgement that women’s empowerment is essential to realising
development goals, which would support economic growth, improvement in maternal and child
health in interrelated development goals that are sustainable. A study into the geographical vari
ability of women empowerment in Nigeria was investigated using the data set from 2018 Nigeria
Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS). We looked into six separate indicators: Self esteem,
contraceptive use, healthcare, access to media, decision making, occupation and earnings, using
latent scores and factor analysis. Overall empowerment was constructed and a multinomial with
ordered categories (Probit link) with geoadditive predictors was used in estimating the effects of
demographic and geographical factors on the effect of empowerment result. Using a Bayesian ap
proach, spatial effects in BayesX were assigned using Markov random field prior, modelling fixed
effects were assigned using non-informative diffuse priors, bayesian P-Spilnes second order random
walk for the non linear smooth functions. Bayesian model diagnostic were carried out with de
viance information criterion. The results showed that women’s empowerment was associated with
educational level, access to newspapers, place of residence, wealth index and listening to radio. We
also observed that age of the woman and age difference of the partner was an important predictor
of women’s empowerment. This study helps to explain the importance of socio-demographic and
economic variables to women’s empowerment. Furthermore, the spatial effects was used to cap
ture the influence of unobserved geographical factors, which are significant to permit modeling of
fundamental processes, that has effect on women empowerment , thereby contributing to the body
of knowledge on women empowerment in Nigeria.
