Education and Women's Empowerment : Evidence from Nigeria

To study the effect of education on women’s empowerment in Nigeria, we employ the variation in the intensity of funding of universal primary education program introduced in Nigeria in 1976 as a source of variation when identifying the individual’s years of schooling. The analysis suggests that increasing female education by one year significantly increases women’s empowerment by about 10 percentage points, statistically significant at one percent. We also exploit the difference- in-differences methodology that looks at the differences in program exposure by region and year of birth. The Universal primary education had impact on educational attainment in Nigeria. Subsequently, we found positive effects of education on women’s empowerment but not statistically significant