Impact of Road Infrastructure on Women Nutrition, Empowerment and Household Nutrition in Rural Nigeria

Abstract

This study evaluates the impact of road infrastructure on women's empowerment and household nutrition in rural Nigeria. Using a Difference-in-Difference (DID) approach combined with Propensity Score Matching (PSM), the research analyzes data from the Value Chain Development Programme (VCDP). The findings indicate that improved road infrastructure significantly enhances market access, which in turn improves the dietary diversity of households and individual women. Specifically, the results show that households in areas with improved road connectivity had a higher dietary diversity score compared to the control group. However, these gains have important trade-offs. While infrastructure improvements expand economic opportunities and improve empowerment scores for women, they also substantially increase their total workload, thereby intensifying time poverty. Evidence from the decomposition of empowerment indicators shows that workload became the dominant contributor to women's disempowerment, accounting for over 60% in 2022, with nearly 90% of women working more than 10.5 hours daily. The study therefore concludes that for infrastructure projects to be fully effective in improving nutritional outcomes, they should be complemented with nutrition-sensitive interventions and labour-saving technologies that reduce women's time burden.