Women's Empowerment in Uganda: Colonial Roots and Contemporary Efforts, 1894-2012

Abstract

This thesis offers new empirical insights on women’s empowerment in colonial and present-day in Uganda. This thesis is organised into two parts. The first part,offers a noval perspective on the long-term development of African male and female human capital formation, skills, labour market participation, intergenerational social mobility, and marriage patterns over the long 20th century, using unique individual-level data from hitherto unexplored Anglican marriage registers. In the second part, a large-scale field survey in Western Uganda highlights the challenges smallholder women face in present-day rural Uganda and investigates the determinants for women’s participation in co-operatives and the potential of collective action to improve female smallholders’ relative social and economic position.To achieve this, the thesis focuses on an in-depth case-study of a single African country, Uganda. this thesis sheds new light on four important questions: 1) How did gender equality develop in the long-run, notably since the beginning of the colonial era to the present-day? 2) How did historical shocks, such as the advent of Christian mission education and the parallel emergence of a colonial cash economy shape intergenerational social mobility and gender inequalities on the household-level over the longue durée? 3) What role can producer and microfinance co-operatives play in empowering female smallholders within their households in present-day rural Uganda? and 4) What determines women’s ability to join and actively participate in collective action?