The Effect of Foreign Aid on Gender Equality: A Study of sub-Saharan Africa

Foreign aid allocated to projects aimed at enhancing gender equality has grown rapidly and amounted to $45 billion in 2017, with the largest share allocated to countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the large amounts, the effectiveness of aid to gender equality aid has received little scholarly attention. This thesis studies the impact of foreign aid aimed at gender equality on a range of indicators of gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa between 2002 and 2016. Using data on foreign aid allocation from the OECD, the thesis employs a range of econometrical approaches to test the effect of gender equality aid on four indicators of gender equality: female labour force participation, the ratio of female to male life expectancy, the share of seats in national parliaments held by women and the ratio of female to male school enrolment rates. The results of the empirical investigation suggest that the effect of gender equality aid is sensitive to the type of gender inequality indicator. Gender inequality aid is found to have a positive effect on the school enrolment ratio and on the share of female parliamentarians. The results for the two remaining indicators were more inconclusive. The differing results between the various indicators suggests a need for great care to be taken both when defining gender equality and when discussing the effectiveness of foreign aid