Dépenses d'éducation et de santé : comptent-elles pour l'autonomisation politique des femmes en Afrique subsaharienne ?[Do Education and Health Spending Matter for Women's Political Empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa?]

This article examines the effect of public health and education expenditure on women’s political empowerment in 47 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1995-2023. Empirical evidence based on fixed-effects panel regressions with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors shows that: (i) public health and education expenditure strengthen women’s political empowerment and its components, namely civil liberties, civil society participation, and formal political participation; (ii) the effect is most pronounced for health expenditure on formal political participation and for education expenditure on civil liberties and civil society participation, while the effect of education is conditional on political stability; and (iii) political stability constitutes one of the channels through which social expenditure translates into women’s political empowerment. These findings remain robust to estimation using the Blundell and Bond (1998) system Generalized Method of Moments (system-GMM) estimator. From a policy perspective, fragile states should prioritize the protection of maternal health budgets as the most robust short-term lever for women’s political empowerment, while investments in education should be accompanied by measures to safeguard women’s civic space.