Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls are a core target of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5). Over the past two decades, China has rapidly expanded its development cooperation with the Global South and become a major bilateral partner for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with infrastructure construction as the defining feature of its aid. While existing studies have identified the effects of China’s aid on economic growth, poverty reduction, and conflict mitigation, systematic evidence on whether and how it affects women’s empowerment in recipient countries remains scarce.

This paper matches the geo-referenced data of 336 completed infrastructure projects implemented between 2001 and 2023, from the latest AidData’s Geospatial Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset (Version 3.0), with micro-level Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) samples of over 370,000 women aged 15–49 across 26 SSA countries. Employing a DID-style design that uses “about-to-be-treated” clusters as the counterfactual, it identifies the effect from the timing of project completion relative to survey dates. The results show that after completion, women within 50 km experience a 0.0256 standard-deviation increase in a composite empowerment index. This effect persists over a relatively long horizon, decays with distance, and approaches zero beyond 100 km. Mechanism testing reveals that aid shifts women toward year-round, non-agricultural, high-skill, and self-employed work, thereby raising their income and bargaining power; it improves access to electricity and clean cooking fuel, alleviating time poverty; and it broadens information access, moving gender norms toward greater equality. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that economic and productive infrastructure exerts a stronger effect than social infrastructure. This effect increases with aid density, and less-educated, rural, and poorer women benefit the most, pointing to an inclusive dividend.

This paper makes the following contributions: First, it extends research on the social effects of China’s aid from the perspective of women’s empowerment, offering new micro-level evidence for the study of South-South cooperation. Second, it draws on the most recent geocoded aid data and the latest DHS rounds, and upgrades exposure measurement from a point-to-point to a “face-to-face” spatial-intersection approach. Third, its micro-identification framework, which combines the latest geocoding, face-to-face exposure measurement, and the comparison between already-treated and about-to-be-treated areas, can be transferred to studies of other social effects of China’s aid and of other donors.