SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN NIGERIA: AN ORDINAL REGRESSION APPROACH

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.