Motivation: Women play a critical role in agriculture. Therefore, empowering them has a great potential to significantly improve economic growth, reduce poverty, and enhance nutrition. By utilizing physical infrastructures, women may build wealth and become economically empowered. However, different type and mix of physical infrastructures have varying effects on women’s empowerment and gender equality. Empirically, studies on the impact of physical infrastructure on women’s empowerment and gender equality are scanty.
Purpose: Based on this premise, this study examines how market and storage facilities use affects women's empowerment and gender equality.
Approach and methods: We collected primary data on a sample of 1,492 households in Ghana and analyzed the data using a multinomial endogenous treatment effects regression model. A mediation analysis was conducted to identify the pathways between infrastructure use and the outcomes using Hayes macro-application “PROCESS” for SPSS.
Findings: We show that using market facility only, storage facility only and both infrastructures promote women’s empowerment. Excerpt for users of storage facility only which has no significant effect on gender equality, the use of market facility only and both infrastructures positively impact on gender equality. The effect size is relatively large for users of both infrastructures than for those that use market only and storage facility only. The use of both infrastructures affects women’s empowerment through the ownership of asset, and lower crop diversification.
Policy implications: Our findings could spur increased investments in market and storage infrastructures to help empower women and close the gender gap.
