New Scorecard Reveals Stark Regional Divides in Ghana’s Push for Gender Equality

A team of Ghanaian researchers has built and tested a multidimensional scorecard designed to measure how the country is really doing on Sustainable Development Goal 5, the global commitment to gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. The study, published in SN Social Sciences, surveyed 2,500 people aged 15 and above across three of Ghana’s most demographically significant regions: Greater Accra on the coast, Ashanti in the forest belt, and Northern Ghana in the savannah. The results paint a picture of a nation where progress is real but unevenly distributed, and where the barriers that hold women back are as much cultural and institutional as they are economic.

The instrument at the heart of the study is a 38-item questionnaire spanning seven distinct dimensions of gender equality: access to education, economic participation, awareness of gender-related policies, socio-cultural attitudes, health services, support for legal frameworks, and vocational training. Rather than relying on a single headline indicator such as school enrolment, the scorecard treats gender equality as a bundle of interlocking conditions, echoing a long line of scholarship, most notably Naila Kabeer’s work on resources, agency, and achievements, which argues that empowerment cannot be captured by any one measure. The researchers, led by Simon Ntumi of the University of Education, Winneba, drew their sample through stratified random sampling, ensuring that respondents were balanced across gender, age group, region, and socio-economic status so that the resulting scores could be compared meaningfully between places and populations.

Before any substantive conclusions could be drawn, the team had to demonstrate that the scorecard itself was statistically sound. They used exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to check that the seven dimensions actually hung together as intended, and they computed three classic psychometric indices: Cronbach’s alpha, a measure of internal consistency; composite reliability, often abbreviated CR; and average variance extracted, or AVE, which gauges convergent validity. The numbers were strong. Cronbach’s alpha reached 0.93, well above the conventional 0.70 threshold, composite reliability stood at 0.92, and average variance extracted came in at 0.50, right at the accepted benchmark. In practical terms, this means the instrument measures something coherent and stable, and that responses to its items are consistent enough to support national-level inference.

With the tool validated, the descriptive findings revealed pronounced regional gradients. Greater Accra generally outperformed both Ashanti and the Northern region across literacy, vocational training participation, and access to information and communication technology. This pattern will surprise no one who has followed Ghana’s development trajectory, but the scorecard’s contribution is to quantify the gaps across many dimensions simultaneously, giving policymakers a single comparable framework rather than a patchwork of separate surveys. The digital divide is a particularly striking component: prior research, including work by Hilbert on the so-called digital gender divide, has shown that women in developing countries often face systematically lower access to mobile technology and the internet, and the Ghanaian data confirm that ICT access remains one of the clearest markers of regional and gendered inequality.

The analytical core of the study is a multiple regression model predicting women’s economic empowerment. Education emerged as the strongest positive predictor, with a standardized coefficient of 0.40 and a p-value below 0.001, meaning the association is extremely unlikely to be a statistical fluke. Vocational training followed closely with a coefficient of 0.35, and household income contributed a further 0.22. On the negative side, living in the Northern region was associated with a coefficient of minus 0.18, and perceived cultural norm constraints with minus 0.20, both statistically significant. Read together, these coefficients tell a coherent story: every additional channel of human capital, whether formal schooling, skills training, or household resources, lifts women’s economic standing, while restrictive social norms and regional disadvantage drag it down even after accounting for education and income.

One of the most consequential findings concerns gender-based violence. The researchers found that gender-sensitive policy implementation was inversely associated with gender-based violence, with a correlation coefficient of minus 0.67 and a p-value below 0.001. This is a strong relationship by social science standards and suggests that when institutions actively implement gender-responsive policies, rather than merely enacting them on paper, rates of reported violence tend to fall. The finding aligns with international evidence, including work published in The Lancet on health-system responses to violence against women, and it underscores a persistent theme in Ghanaian gender policy research: the gap between formal legal commitments, such as the National Gender Policy and Ghana’s obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the everyday reality of enforcement.

The regional differences were not merely suggestive; they were statistically emphatic. An analysis of variance on composite gender-equality scores produced an F statistic of 219.10 with a p-value below 0.001 and an eta-squared of 0.181, indicating that roughly 18 percent of the variance in composite scores is attributable to region alone. In the vocabulary of effect sizes, that is a large effect. It means that where a Ghanaian lives is one of the single most powerful predictors of their gender-equality profile, shaping their literacy, their earning potential, their exposure to vocational training, and their attitudes toward gender roles. For a country that has made substantial national investments in education, including the Education Strategic Plan 2018 to 2030 and the expansion of senior high school access, the message is that national averages conceal as much as they reveal.

The Northern region’s position in the analysis deserves particular attention. Previous scholarship, including studies of socio-cultural barriers to girls’ education in Northern Ghana and UNICEF’s situation analyses of children and women in the region, has documented how early marriage, household labor demands, and entrenched norms about girls’ schooling interact with poverty to depress educational attainment. The scorecard data are consistent with that literature: Northern residence remained a significant negative predictor of empowerment even after controlling for education, income, and training. This suggests that infrastructure and schooling alone will not close the gap; interventions must also engage the normative environment, working with communities, traditional authorities, and men and boys, as scholars such as Jewkes, Flood, and Lang have argued in the context of violence prevention.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates that scorecard-style assessment tools, more familiar from corporate performance management than from development statistics, can be rigorously adapted to social measurement. The combination of factor analysis, reliability testing, regression, correlation, and analysis of variance provides a template that other countries could follow, and the authors position the tool as a practical framework for identifying regional inequalities and informing targeted interventions. The approach also resonates with a growing international interest in gender scorecards, including proposals for balanced scorecards linking gender equality to sustainable development published in the journal Sustainability. The Ghanaian study adds psychometric credibility to that movement, showing that a carefully constructed instrument can achieve both high reliability and validated construct structure in a real, diverse national sample.

The policy implications are clear and, in the authors’ framing, necessarily integrated. Expanding educational and vocational opportunities, particularly for women and girls in the north, strengthening women’s economic participation through income and enterprise support, addressing restrictive gender norms through community engagement, and improving the implementation of gender-responsive policies are not competing priorities but mutually reinforcing ones. The regression results imply, for instance, that vocational training delivers nearly as large an empowerment dividend as formal education, which argues for scaling skills programs alongside schooling reforms. The strong inverse association between policy implementation and gender-based violence suggests that enforcement capacity, not just legislation, is where marginal investment may matter most. As the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals approaches, Ghana’s experience shows both the promise and the difficulty of the enterprise: gender equality is genuinely multidimensional, and only measurement tools that respect that complexity can tell governments where to act next.

Subject of Research: Multidimensional assessment of gender equality and women's empowerment in Ghana using a validated SDG 5 scorecard

Article Title: SDG 5 scorecards: using multi-dimensional assessment tools to track national progress on gender equality in education and social change in Ghana

Article References: Ntumi, S., Yeboah, A., Boye, E., Fuseini, A., Debrah, S., Gyambiby, D., & Gyamfua, E. (2026). SDG 5 scorecards: using multi-dimensional assessment tools to track national progress on gender equality in education and social change in Ghana. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01755-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01755-4

Keywords: gender equality, SDG 5, Ghana, women's economic empowerment, scorecard, regional disparities, education, vocational training, gender-based violence, psychometrics, Northern Ghana, policy implementation