Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of Islamic finance on women empowerment in Africa between the periods of 1975 and 2021.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses secondary data for 27 African countries obtained from the World Development Indicators, World Population Review and the Varieties of Democracy databases. Four dimensions of women empowerment, namely, economic, social, political and household, are considered while Islamic finance is proxied by a binary variable with 1 and 0 representing the presence and the absence of Islamic finance, respectively. The two-staged least square estimation technique is used to control for the problem of endogeneity.

Findings

This study revealed that Islamic finance positively affects women empowerment in Africa. Specifically, Islamic finance has positive and significant effects on women political empowerment, women economic empowerment and women social empowerment in Africa but nonsignificant effect on home empowerment. These effects are more pronounced in middle-income than in low-income countries and in countries with higher penetration rate of Islamic finance.

Practical implications

Policymakers should put in place the necessary mechanisms for the promotion of Islamic finance such as the enacting of laws that ensures the creation of full-fledged Islamic banks, encouraging research in Islamic finance and Islamic economics. These policies should equally be backed by the creation of some accompanying measures such as the abolition of social norms that limit women’s ability to take part in decision-making.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study involving an Africa continent-wide analysis of the effects of Islamic finance on women empowerment.

中文翻译：

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非洲妇女赋权：我们可以依靠伊斯兰金融吗？

目的

本文的目的是研究 1975 年至 2021 年间伊斯兰金融对非洲妇女赋权的影响。

设计/方法论/途径

本文使用从世界发展指标、世界人口评论和民主多样性数据库获得的 27 个非洲国家的二手数据。考虑了妇女赋权的四个维度，即经济、社会、政治和家庭，而伊斯兰金融则由二元变量代表，1和0分别代表伊斯兰金融的存在和不存在。采用两阶段最小二乘估计技术来控制内生性问题。

发现

这项研究表明，伊斯兰金融对非洲妇女赋权产生积极影响。具体而言，伊斯兰金融对非洲妇女政治赋权、妇女经济赋权和妇女社会赋权具有积极且显着的影响，但对家庭赋权影响不显着。这些影响在中等收入国家比在低收入国家和伊斯兰金融渗透率较高的国家更为明显。

实际影响

政策制定者应建立必要的机制来促进伊斯兰金融，例如颁布法律以确保建立成熟的伊斯兰银行，鼓励伊斯兰金融和伊斯兰经济学的研究。这些政策同样应该得到一些配套措施的支持，例如废除限制妇女参与决策能力的社会规范。

原创性/价值

据作者所知，这是第一项涉及整个非洲大陆伊斯兰金融对妇女赋权影响分析的研究。