Across Africa, rural women face a double disadvantage as the urban-rural divide compounds gender gaps in education, employment, asset ownership, and access to financial and digital resources, the latest Afrobarometer (www.Afrobarometer.org) Pan-Africa Profile (https://apo-opa.co/4fK8G9x) shows.

The new report, based on 50,961 interviews across 38 African countries in 2024/2025, shows that women are less likely than men to attain secondary or post-secondary education and to have paid employment. They are also less likely than men to own key productive, financial, and digital assets, including vehicles, bank accounts, mobile-money accounts, mobile phones, and computers. The findings further show that women are less likely than men to report making their own decisions about the use of financial resources.

In addition to these gender gaps, rural women trail urban women by even wider margins on these indicators. In fact, when it comes to access to digital and financial resources, the gaps between urban women and urban men are sometimes dwarfed by those that separate urban and rural women.

The findings point to a notable exception: Rural women report higher levels of participation than urban women in several key types of political engagement, including voting and political party affiliation, suggesting opportunities to strengthen women's voice and representation in rural communities.

Key findings

On educational attainment and access:

• Across 38 African countries, women trail men in educational attainment: 54% of women have secondary or post-secondary education, compared to 62% of men (Figure 1).
  • Rural women are more than twice as likely as urban women to have no formal education (26% vs. 12%), and only about half as likely to have secondary or post-secondary qualifications (39% vs. 66%).

In the workplace:

• Working-age women are less likely than men to have paid employment (25% vs. 39%) (Figure 2).
  • Rural women lag behind urban women in paid employment (19% vs. 30%), with country-level gaps reaching up to 34 percentage points in Eswatini.

In access to key assets and management of financial resources:

• Women are less likely than men to own key assets, including vehicles (16% vs. 35%), financial assets such as bank accounts (33% vs. 43%) and mobile-money accounts (56% vs. 64%), and digital tools such as mobile phones (82% vs. 89%) and computers (16% vs. 22%) (Figure 3).
  • Gaps between urban and rural women are often even wider, including a 17-percentage-point disadvantage in phone ownership by rural women (73% vs. 90%). Rural women are half as likely to have a bank account (21% vs. 42%) and less than one-third as likely to own a computer (7% vs. 24%) (Figure 4).
• Women (36%) are less likely than men (44%) to say they make their own decisions about how to use their financial resources (Figure 5).
  • They are about twice as likely to say that their spouses decide (10% vs. 6%).
  • In most surveyed countries, rural women have weaker voices in financial decision making than their urban sisters: On average, they are 11 percentage points less likely to say they make these decisions themselves (Figure 6).

In politics:

• Women participate in political activities at lower rates than men. But in several types of engagement, including voting and affiliation with political parties, rural women outpace their urban sisters (Figure 7).

Afrobarometer surveys

Afrobarometer is a pan-African, nonpartisan survey research network that provides reliable data on African experiences and evaluations of democracy, governance, and quality of life. Ten survey rounds in up to 45 countries have been completed since 1999. Round 10 surveys (2024/2025) cover 38 countries.

Afrobarometer’s National Partners conduct face-to-face interviews with nationally representative samples of adults in the language of the respondent’s choice that yield country-level results with margins of error of +/-2 to +/-3 percentage points at a 95% confidence level. For more on the sampling methodology, click here (https://apo-opa.co/4xlUcnG).

[1] Here and in all other comparisons of urban and rural women, Seychelles is excluded because the government does not include any urban-rural distinction in its census data.