Empowering women has been a central aim of development policy for decades, reflected in the core goals and targets of both the African Union’s (2015) Agenda 2063 and the United Nations (2015) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is an ambition increasingly integrated into everything from national development plans to the founding documents of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) (Ankut, 2025; Naliaka, 2025) because putting women on an equal footing with men is expected to unleash their full potential to learn, work, create, participate, manage, and lead. Women’s empowerment is seen as an essential means for moving societies forward socially, economically, and politically (Okoh, 2024; UN Women, 2021).
The prioritisation of women’s empowerment and the goals and targets established by Agenda 2063 and the SDGs have helped propel modest gains over the past decade, both globally and in Africa (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2025; UN Women, 2025). But progress has been slow and uneven (African Center for Economic Transformation, 2025), and the Africa Gender Index reveals that African women still only have access to about half of the social, economic, and political opportunities that men enjoy (African Development Bank Group & UNECA, 2024). Similarly, the 2024 SDG Gender Index shows that no country globally has achieved gender equality, and in Africa, Mauritius is the only country that earns even a “fair” rating with respect to women’s status, rather than the “poor” or “very poor” ratings bestowed across the rest of the continent. At current rates of progress, Equal Measures 2030 (2024) predicts that few women will live to see gender equality in their lifetimes.
Hurdles may be especially high for rural women, who could play a key role as drivers of economic development (Maina, 2025; Moyo, 2025; United Nations Women Watch, 2012a,b). Yet most efforts to track women’s progress fail to make the critical distinction between the experiences, challenges, and achievements of rural women and those of their urban sisters, which may be markedly different. For many rural women, a lack of access to basicinfrastructure and services places extra demands on their time and limits their ability to take advantage of information and opportunities that are essential to tapping into their full potential. Rural women are also more likely to be held back by entrenched attitudes and expectations (Ankut, 2025). Yet most measures of women’s equality ignore these critical urban-rural differences.
In this report, we focus on gaps in women’s empowerment not just by comparing women to men, but also by comparing urban and rural women’s experiences and opportunities in schools, workplaces, the halls of political power, and their homes. This lens highlights the crucial fact that rural women are often being left behind not only in education, but also in their ability to engage in an ever more digital and connected world. In fact, when it comes to access to key technologies and communications and financial resources, the gaps between urban women and urban men are sometimes dwarfed by those that separate urban and rural women. And although Africa is an urbanising continent, Afrobarometer’s Round 10 (2024/2025) sample – distributed in proportion to census statistics for each country – is still about evenly divided between urban (51%) and rural (49%) respondents. In other words, about half of all African women still live in rural areas, and if this group is left behind, the negative implications for economic, social, and political development will be profound.
One encouraging note, however, is that rural women outpace their urban sisters in several key aspects of political participation, revealing a level of engagement that could be tapped as a mechanism for raising rural women’s voices and accelerating and extending the process of change in rural communities.
Dominique Dryding is Afrobarometer’s capacity building manager (basic track).
Josephine Appiah-Nyamekye Sanny
Josephine is Afrobarometer’s director of communications.
Carolyn is a senior adviser at Afrobarometer.
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Pan-Africa Profile
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Identity, society, and gender
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