Public Policy Programmes and the Promotion of Female Entrepreneurship: The Case of Nigeria in Sub-Sahara-Africa

This study explores the impact of public policy programmes and initiatives on gender equality advancement in the global south context, using Nigeria as a case. The study investigates how gender equality is recognised, framed and constructed in public economic policy text or documents. However, public economic policies significantly impact our lives and play a crucial role in creating guidelines, principles, and strategies for addressing societal issues. However, our national public policies are often gendered and biased in various ways. For example, in politics, decision-making, and business, economic policy choices affect men and women differently, and it frames our understanding of the worldview on policy issues. In exploring the research question and objectives, this study used a contemporary research approach by creating a theoretical framework for the study analysis, built upon a gendered perspective or approach. Using a gendered approach was to prevent a research bias on the topic, as gender inequality can be socially, culturally and historically constructed differences between men and women based on traditional ideology on femininity and masculinity West & Zimmerman, (1987), or it can manifest through social roles, culture, or normative expectation of behaviours in our society (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2016).

However, applying a gendered perspective to public policies is essential to unravel the true nature of public policies and how they recognise and progress gender equality. However, adopting a feminist perspective on the issues of gender shows that gender is socially, historically, economically, politically and culturally framed. In this approach, the focus of the study expands into a wider perspective on gender by exploring gender in policy from a wider context by looking at the individual level, contexts, social, economic, cultural and political settings. Thus, the interest of this research is not only to investigate or compare women or men but instead explore how gender is diffused in government (Ahl, 2014; Henry et al., 2016) with a focus on the impact of gendered policy programmes texts in the global south economies using Nigeria as a case example.

This dissertation provides a systematic way to study the framing of gender in economic policy text with the combination of other empirical findings studies with different analytical techniques. The first empirical paper was a literature review on gender and public policy, followed by another paper, “the reasons for public policy adoption. However, the empirical materials aim to complete four academic peer-reviewed journal articles. The first academic paper is an article on policy document or text analysis of gender recognition in the Nigerian policy context. The paper used qualitative content analysis to analyse how gender is recognised in Nigerian policy documents. The analysis confirms the recognition of gender in public policies by subjective bias and mediating access to education for female gender advancement. The second study examines how gender progress has been framed through different policy periods in the policy documents using both qualitative content and thematic analysis. The study shows that progress has been framed towards progressing gender quality, human development and education to improve socioeconomic development. The third study examines how gender education has been framed for women's advancement; the fourth paper is ongoing.
This study provides theoretical contributions to gender equality advancement by delving deeper into gender in economic policy issues. This study is relevant not only in its readiness but also approached contemporarily in the sense that gender recognition and the general framing of gender issues through policy programmes impact the lives of individuals and the larger society, also by showing how gender issues can be dissected through economic policy programmes in the global south context of sub-Sahara Africa.