EDUCATION and late marriage, which are commonly attributed to women’s empowerment and autonomy, were not linked to better wellbeing in Jigawa State, a study has said.
In a new study, researchers found that higher levels of education and increasing women’s age were significantly associated with lower mental wellbeing in a cross-sectional household survey conducted in Jigawa State amongst women aged 16 to 49, with at least one child under five years.
The household survey conducted in Kiyawa Local Government Area in Jigawa State, from January 2020 to March 2020, estimated associations between recent child illness, care-seeking, socio-demographic factors and mental wellbeing in these women.
Overall, 1,661 eligible women were surveyed, and 8.5 percent had high mental wellbeing and 29.5 percent had low mental wellbeing. Increasing wealth quintiles, not being a subsistence farmer and having a sick child in the last twp weeks were significantly associated with higher mental wellbeing.
The 2023 study in the PLOS Global Public Health said very few women who practice subsistence farming had high mental wellbeing, compared to 54.6 percent who are small business owners and professionals.
Women who reported that their child was sick in the last two weeks during the study had higher mental wellbeing compared to those who did not report a sick child within the same period.
Of all the women who reported that their child was sick in the last two weeks, 36.9 percent had high mental wellbeing compared to 15.9 percent who had low mental well-being.
The data was part of the wider baseline survey for the INSPIRING Project carried out between January 7, 2020 and March 17, 2020, while the study is limited to women who are permanent residents of Kiyawa LGA.
Given that a woman’s age is linked to the number of years spent in marriage, a negative effect could be explained by the fact that the more years a woman spends in a marriage, the higher her chances of being in a polygamous marriage, and, therefore, concerns over their status in the household may arise; however, a woman’s ranking amongst her husband’s wives was not significantly associated with wellbeing.
According to them, “we found that women who had a recent illness amongst one of their children did not have a measurable reduction in wellbeing, but rather had a small increase in their wellbeing.
“Findings contradicted our working hypothesis that a recently sick child would be associated with lower mental wellbeing. We were surprised that education and late marriage, which are commonly attributed to women’s empowerment and autonomy, were not linked to better wellbeing here.”
They, however, said that future work could focus on locally defined tools to measure wellbeing reflecting the norms and values of communities, while ensuring solutions that are culturally acceptable and desirable to women with low mental wel-being are initiated.
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