Publication: Nutrition, Religion, and Widowhood in Nigeria
Loading...
Published
2018-08
ISSN
Date
2018-08-15
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
It is known that Muslim women in Nigeria have significantly worse nutritional status than their Christian counterparts. The paper first shows that this difference is explained by covariates including geographic location, ethnicity, household wealth, and women’s education. However, on accounting for observable characteristics, Muslim widows enjoy a higher nutritional status than Christian widows, particularly in rural areas. The patterns are robust to including village fixed effects and are confirmed for mixed religion ethnic groups. The data are consistent with more favorable processes following widowhood among Muslims, namely inheritance practices and remarriage options. Data on inheritance and violence patterns by religion confirm that Muslim widows are significantly less likely to be dispossessed of their late husband's property or to be mistreated upon widowhood by in-laws. Muslim women are more likely to be chronically undernourished but less nutritionally vulnerable to this marital shock.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Milazzo, Annamaria; van de Walle, Dominique. 2018. Nutrition, Religion, and Widowhood in Nigeria. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8549. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30239 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication South Africa’s Fragmented Cities: The Unequal Burden of Labor Market Frictions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-08)Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellite data, this paper shows that South African cities are characterized by spatial mismatches between where people live and where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areas within 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewer residents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60 percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoods are most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increase in distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a 3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In Cape Town, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, respectively. Employment is 87 percent lower in the poorest decile than the richest in Johannesburg and 61 percent lower in Cape Town. These findings suggest that South Africa’s spatial organization of people and economic activity constrains agglomeration and reinforces inequality. This methodology provides a scalable and standardized data-driven framework to analyze spatial accessibility and agglomeration frictions in complex, data-constrained urban systems.Publication The Evolution of Local Participatory Democracy in Nepal(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-05)Nepal is, according to its constitution, among the world’s most decentralized countries, with a long and complex tradition of local-level public participation. This paper traces the evolution of Nepal’s modern participatory institutions, examining the extent to which they are “induced” by external interventions versus being “organically” rooted in indigenous practices. The paper identifies three broad phases: an initial focus on participation in project implementation; a subsequent phase that expanded citizen engagement; and a third phase of citizen empowerment, culminating in the 2015 federal constitution, which granted unprecedented local autonomy. The analysis yields five key findings. First, over the past 50 years, successive reforms have progressively expanded opportunities for citizens to influence local decision-making. Second, these reforms have integrated traditional participatory mechanisms into formal institutions of local government. Third, although central-level initiatives exist, most participatory platforms continue to operate at the local level. Fourth, the federal constitution has created a new landscape of local democracy, embedding autonomy and accountability. Fifth, although they are still valued in many ethnic and territorial communities, traditional participatory practices are gradually disappearing. The paper concludes by offering policy recommendations to help donor agencies and governments strengthen Nepal’s democratic trajectory. It argues that effective interventions should build on Nepal’s deep participatory traditions while recognizing the constitutional reality of far-reaching local autonomy.Publication Institutional Capacity for Policy Implementation: An Analytical Framework(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)State capacity is an important prerequisite for policy implementation, yet at the country level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. This paper proposes a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, the paper defines the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and groups them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). The paper proposes measures for organizational and governance dimensions using existing data, shows intra-institutional variation of these measures within countries, and discusses how new data could be collected for better measurement of these concepts. Finally, the paper illustrates how the framework can be used to diagnose the sources of common problems related to weak policy implementation.Publication Closing the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Overcoming Challenges in Law and Practice for Female Entrepreneurs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)Despite significant strides toward gender equality, women around the world continue to encounter systemic obstacles that hinder their entrepreneurial success. This paper systematically reviews the literature on the barriers female entrepreneurs face and the solutions proposed to overcome these challenges. It discusses institutional factors, financial factors, human capital factors, and social and cultural factors. The literature overview is complemented by a series of stylized facts that illustrate how overcoming some of these existing barriers is correlated with improved women’s entrepreneurship and female labor force participation, drawing on the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law database as well as the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys. The findings underscore the need for creating an enabling environment where women can thrive as entrepreneurs.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Women Left Behind?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06)This paper is motivated by two stylized facts about poverty in Africa: female-headed households tend to be poorer, and poverty has been falling in the aggregate since the 1990s. These facts raise two questions: How have female-headed households fared? And what role have they played in Africas impressive recent aggregate growth and poverty reduction? Using data covering the entire region, the paper reexamines the current prevalence and characteristics of female-headed households, and asks whether their prevalence has been rising over time, what factors have been associated with such changes since the mid-1990s, and whether poverty has fallen equi-proportionately for male- and female-headed households. Rising gross domestic product has dampened rising female headship. However, other subtle transformations occurring across Africa—changes in marriage behavior, family formation, health, and education—have put upward pressure on female headship, with the result that the share of female-headed households has been growing. This has been happening alongside declining aggregate poverty incidence. However, rather than being left behind, female-headed households have generally seen faster poverty reduction. As a whole, this group has contributed almost as much to the reduction in poverty as male-headed households, despite the smaller share of female-headed households in the population.Publication Son Preference, Fertility and Family Structure : Evidence from Reproductive Behavior among Nigerian Women(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-05)Strong boy-bias and its consequences for young and unborn girls have been widely documented for Asia. This paper considers a country in Sub-Saharan Africa and finds that parental gender preferences do affect fertility behavior and shape traditional social institutions with negative effects on adult women's health and well-being. Using individual-level data for Nigeria, the paper shows that, compared to women with first-born sons, women with first-born daughters have (and desire) more children and are less likely to use contraceptives. Women with daughters among earlier-born children are also more likely to have shorter birth intervals, a behavior medically known to increase the risk of child and maternal mortality. Moreover, they are more likely to end up in a polygynous union, to be divorced, and to be head of the household. The preference for sons is also supported by child fostering patterns in which daughters are substitutes for foster girls, while the same does not hold for sons and foster boys. These results can partly explain excess female mortality among adult women in Sub-Saharan Africa.Publication Is It What You Inherited or What You Learnt? Intergenerational Linkage and Interpersonal Inequality in Senegal(2011-05-01)Institutional features of the African setting -- large extended families and imperfect credit and land markets -- matter to the equity and efficiency roles played by intergenerational linkages. Using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption, this paper studies the role played by land inheritance, other bequests and parental background as influences on an adult's economic welfare and economic activities. Although intergenerational linkages are evident, the analysis finds a seemingly high degree of mobility across generations, associated with the shift from farm to non-farm sectors and the greater economic activity of women. Male-dominated bequests of land and housing bring little gain to mean consumption and play little role in explaining inequality, although they have effects on the sector of activity. Inheritance of non-land assets and the education and occupation of parents (especially the mother) and their choices about children's schooling are more important to adult welfare than property inheritance. Significant gender inequality in consumption is evident, although it is almost entirely explicable in terms of factors such as education and (non-land) inheritance. There are a number of other pronounced gender differences, with intergenerational linkages coming through the mother rather than the father.Publication Lasting Welfare Effects of Widowhood in a Poor Country(2011-07-01)Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards on average than male or other female headed households in both rural and urban areas; this holds both unconditionally and conditional on observable household and individual characteristics including age. Furthermore, the adverse welfare effects of widowhood appear to persist even after widows are absorbed into male headed households. An examination of individual measures of well-being further reveals that, relative to other women, worse outcomes for ever-widowed women persist through remarriage. These detrimental effects are passed on to children, indicating an intergenerational transmission of poverty stemming from widowhood.Publication Customary Norms, Inheritance, and Human Capital(American Economic Association, 2017-10)We study the role of traditional norms in land allocation and human capital investment. We exploit a policy experiment in Ghana that increased the land that children from matrilineal groups could inherit from their fathers. Boys exposed to the reform received 0.9 less years of education—an effect driven by landed households, for whom the reform was binding. We find no effect for girls, whose inheritance was de facto unaffected. These patterns suggest that before the reform matrilineal groups invested more in education than they would if unconstrained, to substitute for land inheritance, underscoring the importance of cultural norms.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Reforming Payments and Securities Settlement Systems in Latin America and the Caribbean(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2007)The payments and securities settlement system is the infrastructure (comprising institutions, instruments, rules, procedures, standards, and technical means) established to effect the transfer of monetary value between parties discharging mutual obligations. A securities clearance and settlement system can be considered as part of the overall payment mechanisms of a country, in that it satisfies the main features of this overall definition The purpose of this book is to (a) extract the main lessons and experiences of the Western Hemisphere Payments and Securities Clearance and Settlement Initiative - Western Hemisphere Payments and Securities Settlement Forum (WHI-WHF) regarding the implementation of various reforms; (b) describe status of and major trends in payments and securities settlement systems worldwide and their implications for the LAC region; (c) summarize the detailed assessment findings for each LAC country in the following fields: (1) legal and regulatory framework, (2) main characteristics of the inter-bank exchange and settlement circuits, (3) retail settlement systems, (4) the role of the government as a major participant in the payments system, (5) foreign exchange and cross-border settlement, (6) the operation of the inter-bank money market, (7) aspects related to securities settlement such as the legal framework, clearance and settlement processes, settlement risks, operational reliability, custody, depositories' organizational arrangements, cross-border links, and (8) the oversight role of the central bank, coordination with the regulatory and supervisory role over securities settlement, and cooperation with the private sector; and (d) propose practical observations regarding the implementation of payments and securities settlement system reforms in the LAC region.Publication São Tomé and Príncipe - Unpacking Migration Dynamics(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), a lower-middle-income small island nation, is undergoing a significant wave of emigration, primarily driven by limited job opportunities and economic prospects, particularly among younger generations. This paper explores migration's drivers, dynamics, and impacts on the country’s economy and social fabric, drawing on a combination of primary and secondary data sources. These include local emigration records, the national social registry, the latest household budget survey, global estimates of migrant stocks and remittance flows, and focus group discussions with migrant families. The findings reveal that at least 18 percent of STP’s population now resides abroad, with numbers growing rapidly. Migration is increasingly dominated by young individuals moving to Portugal, attracted by shared linguistic and cultural ties and facilitated by a recent Community of Portuguese Language Countries mobility agreement. However, migration currently delivers limited economic benefits to STP, as remittances are low, irregular, and constrained by high transfer costs, inadequate financial infrastructure, and migrants’ precarious employment abroad. Socially, migration may also disrupt family structures, particularly affecting children who face challenges in care and emotional wellbeing. Policy recommendations include enhancing migrants’ employability, exploring bilateral migration partnerships, strengthening migration management systems, improving remittance services, and supporting families who remain in the country through social assistance.Publication Blockchain in Financial Services in Emerging Markets, Part I(International Finance Corporation, Washington, DC, 2017-08)Financial institutions around the world find themselves continually barraged by external innovations they are often unable to absorb and internalize. The emergence of innovative digital financial technologies has challenged traditional players in the sector by demonstrating new ways to deliver value across the entire financial value chain. Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, is just such a disruptive, and possibly game-changing, innovation. Emerging markets are in general characterized by low banking penetration, the exit of financial players from certain markets, strong demand for financial inclusion both from individual consumers and small businesses, high levels of mobile penetration, and less developed business infrastructure and financial sector incumbents. These conditions in combination can be a powerful catalyst for the adoption of blockchain-based financial solutions and can provide the basis for a technological leap forward and a boost to financial inclusion and growth.Publication Interest Rate Caps(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04)Ceilings on lending rates remain a widely used policy tool that is intended to lower the overall cost of credit or protect consumers from exorbitant rates. Interest rate caps come in many forms and scopes and, according to their rationale, ceilings can affect a small segment or the overall market. Over the past years, many countries have introduced new or tightened existing restrictions, while only a few have removed or eased them. This paper takes stock of recent developments in interest rates caps globally and classifies them according to a novel taxonomy. The paper also presents six case studies of different types of interest rate caps. The case studies indicate that while some forms of interest rate caps can indeed reduce lending rates and help to limit predatory practices by formal lenders, interest rate caps often have substantial unintended side-effects. These side-effects include increases in non-interest fees and commissions, reduced price transparency, lower credit supply and loan approval rates for small and risky borrowers, lower number of institutions and reduced branch density, as well as adverse impacts on bank profitability. Given these potential negative consequences of interest rate caps, the paper discusses alternatives to reduce the cost of credit.