Does the digital divide hinder women's educational performance? Evidence from African Countries

prince PIVA ASALOKO, université de Yaoundé 2

This article analyses the influence of the digital divide on the educational performance of women in a panel of 54 African countries over the period 2000-2021. Using the GMM-SYS, our main results show that the digital divide weakens the educational performance of women in Africa. By adding institutional variables to the basic model, this negative effect of the digital divide is confirmed. Furthermore, we found that the digital divide between regions is also a severe handicap for the educational performance of women in regions with low digital coverage. Our results remain robust when using alternative measures of the digital divide and women's educational performance. Similarly, we found that using the Quantile-Regression (QR) method, the results reveal that in all quantiles (10th to 95th) the digital divide weakens women's educational performance.