The Effect of Women Empowerment on Poverty Alleviation in Mezam Division-Cameroon

Unequal opportunities between women and men continue to hamper women’s ability to lift themselves from poverty and gain more options to improve their living standards. Women are economically disadvantaged: for example, culturally, they do not own any property; girls are marginalized in education whereby some parents prefer to take boys to good schools and do not like to take girls to good schools. This study intends to examine the effect of various dimensions of women empowerment on multiple constituents of household poverty in the six-sub divisions of Mezam division. The primary data was gathered from a sample of 319 married and employed females who live in Mezam division. For analysis, the study develops its own all-embracing Women Empowerment and Household Poverty variables using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and examines the relationship between the empowerment of women and household poverty using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that women empowerment positively and significantly contributes towards household poverty reduction. The results of the study suggest that in addition to targeting poverty directly, policies should be devised that eradicate poverty through the empowerment of women.