The first five years of the child’s life are critical for their cognitive, social, and physical development. Still, every year more than 200 million children under-five years fail to achieve their full developmental potential in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The family environment is a key determinant of child survival and optimal development. Poverty, discrimination, conflict and other forms of individual, family and community stress create barriers for families to provide nurturing care for children and may compromise their ability to parent effectively. This may be exacerbated in contexts where gender inequalities and women’s marginalization are common. Although women´s empowerment has been associated with improved child health and development outcomes, this is a topic little studied in LMICs.

We investigated the associations between women´s empowerment and early childhood development among a sample population of 84537 children aged 36-59 months from national health surveys of 26 African countries. The study covers all countries with surveys in the region and uses a novel approach for measuring women’s empowerment, the SWPER.

Four developmental domains were assessed among children using the Early Childhood Development Index:

- Literacy-numeracy

- Physical

- Learning

- Socioemotional

Three domains of women’s empowerment were evaluated using the SWPER global, a validated survey-based index: attitude to violence, social independence and decision-making.

Across all countries, 15·1% of the children were on track in the literacy-numeracy domain, 92·3% in physical, 81·3% in learning and 67·8% in socio-emotional. Despite substantial heterogeneity between countries in the association of mother’s empowerment with ECD, we showed that generally higher maternal empowerment levels – particularly for the social independence domain - were strongly associated with the acquisition of literacy-numeracy skills in several African countries. In contrast, the mothers’ empowerment level presented weak or null associations with the three other developmental domains. Empowering women is a goal in itself, but it also has a great potential to improve health and economic outcomes both at household and community level. Given the results of this study, programs and interventions aimed at improving the future human capital of today’s children may also consider addressing the empowerment of women and the reduction of gender inequalities. Here, a free version of the article: JoGH