Female Empowerment and Early Childhood Health Investments: The Long-Term Effect of Matrilineal Kinship in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sammanfattning: How we choose to invest in the future generations is becoming increasingly imperative as researchers learn more about the long-term consequences of early childhood. The early-life literature suggests that empowered mothers invest more into their children and that matrilineal females are more empowered than patrilineal counterparts. To further understand the role of female empowerment on early childhood investments, this paper combines these two insights and investigates the effects of ancestral matrilineal kinship organizations on contemporaneous early childhood health investments. In this pursuit, I bring the growing anthropological methodology into the health economics literature. I utilize Murdock’s ethnographic atlas together with individual level cross-section survey data for 166,982 births in 26 sub-Saharan countries and find evidence that contemporaneous mothers with matrilineal ancestry invest more in their children’s health than patrilineal counterparts. I do not, however, find support that this is due to female empowerment, or that matrilineal mothers are more empowered by their ancestry. Moreover, I conclude that the mothers’ partners are more important than theory suggests, and that local geographical or demographic factors need to be controlled for in order to establish causality.