Gender-inclusive governance, women’s empowerment, and climate-resilient agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Climate change challenges continue to intensify agricultural vulnerabilities across Sub-Saharan African countries (SSA), however, the extent to which gender-inclusive governance strengthens agricultural climate resilience remains poorly understood in the region. This research explores the relationships between gender inclusive governance, women’s economic empowerment, and climate-resilient agricultural outcomes among ten SSA countries from 2005 to 2024. Guided by participatory governance theory as well as feminist political ecology, the study integrates governance processes with gendered adaptation dynamics. Employing the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) ARDL estimator, the analysis identifies both short- and long-run effects of women’s legal rights, and educational inclusion, and labour participation on agricultural resilience indicators. The results indicate that women’s legal rights and labour force participation significantly increase short-run resilience, but female educational attainment has stronger long-run effects. The finding also highlights continuous structural constraints, where improvements in food security do not outrightly mean translation into resilient systems when gendered resource inequality persists. The study however contributes new multi-country quantitative based evidence on the governance gender resilience relationships and provides desirable insights relevant to SDGs 2, 5, and 13 accordingly.