Women's empowerment in Uganda: colonial roots and contemporary efforts, 1894-2012

This thesis offers new empirical insights on women’s empowerment in colonial and present-day in Uganda. This thesis is organised into two parts. The first part, offers a novel perspective on the long-term development of African male and female human capital formation, skills, labour market participation, intergenerational social mobility, and marriage patterns over the long 20th century, using unique individual-level data from hitherto unexplored Anglican marriage registers. In the second part, a large-scale field survey in Western Uganda highlights the challenges smallholder women face in present-day rural Uganda and investigates the determinants for women’s participation in co-operatives and the potential of collective action to improve female smallholders’ relative social and economic position. To achieve this, the thesis focuses on an in-depth case-study of a single African country, Uganda.