Women education in Ethiopia

Abstract

BACKGROUND Education is a vehicle for national economic development equally as for individual advancement. Historically, girls were denied opportunities for schooling in most of the regions and societies of Ethiopia. So this study geared towards the factors of women's education level in Ethiopia. METHODS Secondary data on women’s data sets were obtained from the 2016 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey. A population-based cross-sectional study design was used for the survey. The sampling technique used for the survey was the two-stage sampling technique, which is stratified in the first stage and equal probability systematic selection technique in the second stage. An ordinal logistic regression model was fitted to identify the determinants of women education in Ethiopia. RESULTS Among the random sample of 17137 women, the majority 7647(44.62%) were illiterate. This is evidence that most the women are still under the darkness of illiteracy and having meager participation in higher education. The odds ratios for women’s age at first birth, women’s age at marriage, women from rural areas, families wealth index: poorer, middle, richer, the richest, religion: Catholic, Muslim, and Protestant religions were given as 1.022 (p value: <0.0001), 1.02 (p value: <0.0001), 0.121 (p value: <0.0001), 1.492 (p value:=0.0235), 1.971 (p value: <0.0001), 3.072 (p value: <0.0001), 4.582(p value: <0.0001), 0.185 (p value: =0.0074), 0.762 (p value: =0.0175), and 0.75 (p value: =0.0444) respectively, and they are statistically significant predictors of education level among women in Ethiopia. CONCLUSION The results of this study showed that most of the women were illiterate due to different reasons. Thus, the federal government, the Ministry of Education, and the Regional Education Bureaus must enforce the legal age of marriage and increase the number of schools and other infrastructure in rural areas.