Female-Headed Poverty in Senegal: A Mixed Methods Study

Gender and poverty in Senegal have not been thoroughly studied. The World Bank (2015) found unexpectedly that female-headed households were less poor than average (unlike the case in most African countries), but did not probe this result. We propose to both more fully exploit the quantitative data (which we access thanks to a partnership with the World Bank) and also to gather new qualitative data to ground-truth this finding. We expect to find nuances about female poverty that will inform policy and development strategy in Senegal.