Abstract
In the continent of Africa there remains a noticeable presence of gender inequality in education across many of its constituent countries. This exploratory study considers how general measures of the equality of women in a country confers itself to gender parity in education as well as overall governance (the latter a benchmark elucidation). The countries of Africa form the basis for the study, using data from the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, over the years 2012 through to 2021. The country based measures of, Political Power & Representation, Equal Rights & Civil Liberties, Socioeconomic Opportunity, Equal Access to Public Services and Laws on Violence against Women, are used to cluster the African country-year observations considered. The established clusters, using fuzzy c-means clustering, are defined and subsequently tested for validity against two further measures (at country level), gender parity in education and overall governance. Investigating these two ‘different’ measures also illustrates the separation of education gender parity and governance across Africa over the considered years. Results offer practical evidence of the way gender parity in education and overall governance can be described against general typologies (clusters) of women’s equality issues across the countries and years considered.