Does gender equality in education matter for environmental sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa?

Abstract

The present study provides a macro-level framework for gender issues and their link to energy policies and environmental quality, in line with the sustainable development goals (SDG). It examines the relationship between environmental sustainability, gender equality in education, energy consumption, and sub-Saharan Africa's income by using cointegration analysis and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method. The study's estimation results are consistent with the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis and policy actions suggested by eco-feminist theories in both the short-run and long-run and show that gender equality in education has positively related to environmental sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa.