A Multidimensional Perspective for Women’s Empowerment–Sustainability in Africa: Examining Multiple Sources of Heterogeneity and the Role of Renewable Energy

This study develops a novel composite index of women’s empowerment for 54 African economies over the period 1996–2024 (unbalanced), addressing the limitations of existing fragmented measures. The index is constructed using principal component factor loadings and captures multiple dimensions of empowerment, including economic, socio-demographic, cultural, political, physical, and cognitive aspects, particularly for groups historically exposed to structural marginalization. We investigate the structural, distributional, and conditional effects of women’s empowerment on environmental sustainability. Structural heterogeneity is addressed using heterogeneous panel estimators that allow coefficients to vary across countries. Distributional properties are examined through novel panel unit root tests that incorporate quantile-based approaches, enabling assessment of persistence and stationarity across different points of the conditional distribution rather than only the mean. Conditional effects are further explored by introducing renewable energy consumption as a moderating factor in the empowerment–environment nexus. The analysis is supported by a comprehensive set of second-generation econometric techniques that account for cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity. In addition, panel causality tests incorporating Fourier smooth-transition specifications are employed to capture structural breaks and gradual regime shifts, ensuring that causal relationships are not assumed to be time-invariant but are allowed to evolve in response to structural change. The results reveal strong structural heterogeneity across African economies. While static estimators occasionally suggest a carbon-increasing effect of women’s empowerment, heterogeneous and dynamic models consistently show that empowerment reduces carbon emissions in the long run. Renewable energy consumption independently exerts a significant mitigating effect on emissions across all specifications. However, the interaction between women’s empowerment and renewable energy is positive and statistically significant, indicating that greater renewable energy adoption enhances the environmental effectiveness of women’s empowerment, suggesting that gender-inclusive policies are more effective when accompanied by a cleaner energy transition. The study concludes that sustainable development in Africa requires integrated, context-specific policies that jointly promote women’s empowerment, renewable energy expansion, and institutional strengthening.