Socio-Economic Implication of Political and Economic Participation of Women in Nigeria

This paper examined social-economic impacts of economic and political empowerment of women in Nigeria between 1990–2018. To achieve our main objective, we employed a trend analysis and ARDL technique with data sourced from the WDI (2019) and various issues of National Bureau of Statistics. We observed that the growth of women (between age 15 and 64) in labour force participation in Nigeria is trending downwardly during the period under consideration. While the proportion of female representation in the parliament has been on the increase since the advent of the fourth Republic in 1999. Finally, we unsurprisingly, discovered that despite the huge resources committed to advocacy for women’s empowerment, the social costs in terms of the increased crime rate among youth and the level of insecurity in the country significantly overwhelmed the economic benefits in term of increased economic growth. Consequently, we inter alia recommended that the governments together with these advocacy groups should channel the same amount of resources devoted to campaigns for women empowerment into reversing the ugly trend of juvenile delinquency if the level of insecurity in Nigeria is to be curtailed. And, the proposed bill by the National Assembly and the 36 state Houses of Assemblies to increase the maternity leave from its current level of 3 months to 6 months should be fast-track and duly implemented across board in both public and private organizations.