Women's Empowerment, Sanitation and Health: Empirical Insights From Developing Countries

We analyse the effect of women's empowerment and access to sanitation on health outcomes using panel data from 115 developing economies between 2000 and 2022. This study adopts a panel data approach and estimation techniques capable of handling cross‐sectional dependency and endogeneity issues. The results based on the Lewbel two‐stage least squares method indicate that, on average, women's political empowerment, measured with women's civil liberties, women's civil society participation, and women's political participation, significantly improves population health outcomes measured with life expectancy and maternal, infant and under‐five mortality. The findings also show that access to sanitation services significantly enhances life expectancy and maternal and child health outcomes. The study further demonstrates that women's political empowerment positively moderates the impact of sanitation on health outcomes, suggesting that in countries with better (higher) women's political empowerment, sanitation essentially leads to better health outcomes and vice versa. The results are consistently robust across different econometric techniques but differ across geopolitical regions. The outcome of the study is important to public health policies, as it underscores that policies that enhance gender inclusivity in the political sphere and access to sanitation services would be valuable for improving population health outcomes in developing countries.