Women’s Economic Empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Capturing within-Country Heterogeneity Using the DBS Method

Women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a topic of growing interest, which recent DHS data allow researchers to examine in detail. Analyses conducted at the country or group level, however, often rely on synthetic indicators that compress complex realities into a single measure (such as a sum or an average). This may oversimplify the situation and conceal internal heterogeneity. This limitation can be addressed through the advanced version of the Distance Between Strata (DBS) method introduced here. First proposed in 2016, this technique focuses on similarities between pairs of countries (or groups) and translates them into a series of distance measures from each country to every other. Until now, DBS has been applied only to cultural or opinion data in developed countries; its use in a new context (SSA, between 2010 and 2018) and on a new type of data (WEE) is therefore innovative. More importantly, the paper presents a methodological novelty: the creation of “ideal types”, that is, hypothetical countries with predefined positive or negative characteristics. These act as “poles” in a graph and help interpret the position of actual countries—identifying those with the best or worst performances, or time trends, and in which specific domain: education, labour market participation, or individual decision-making power. The advantages and limitations of this approach, both under the theoretical and practical profile, are discussed in detail in the concluding sections of the paper.