Gender characteristics of poverty with emphasis on the rural sector

Abstract

A major concern of this report is to examine the extent to which- the concept of feminization of poverty is a reality in SSA. In order to test this hypothesis one has to look into the different characteristics of poverty, including the sex of the household head; the income of the household; and/or consumption expenditure; the age of the household; family size; education level of the head of the household; female /male enrolment ratios; type of employment; marital status; access to productive assets such as land, oxen etc.; and access to credit. Due to the limitations of the available data set all the above information is not readily available, thus the results are limited to consumption expenditure of the household to determine the poverty line and consequently the head-count ratio, and the education level by gender, employment by head of household and the population by gender and age group.