IMPACT OF OMO-MICROFINANCE INSTITUTIONS ON WOMEN’S  ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT IN Wolayta zone
Creators: name: DAWIT ESATU SALA
Publisher: name: National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia
Year: 2016

description: Microfinance institution program plays  an important role in women’s economic empowerment
enhancing  independent  income  generation,  prosperity  of  asset  accumulation,  smoothing 
household  expenditure,  mobilizing  saving  and  entrepreneur  development .  Since  the  impact  of 
MFIs  services  on women economic empowerment has no common consensus among different 
academicians, some of them argued it has positive and some other argued has negative impact. 
Therefore, the study was attempted to assess the economic empowerment of women’s through 
impact of OMFIs program conducted in Wolaita Zone Damot Gale and Damot Pullasa woreda 
districts, SNNP, Ethiopia by using primary data through structured questionnaire. 
The  study  includes  a  total  of  285  subjects  where  convenient  sampling  was  used  to 
selected two Woreda randomly and then  stratified random sampling techniques  is  used to group 
sample population from total study population of 1096 due to heterogeneity of population by  the 
intended  purpose  borrowing;  agricultural,  commercial  and  small  microenterprise  service 
economic  activities.  The  primary  data  collected  by  interviewing  285  rural  respondents  using 
questionnaire in addition to primary data that 255 respondents correctly stated the questionnaire. 
A  descriptive  statistics  and  multiple  logistic  regression  analysis  are  employed  to 
analyze the impact of OMFIs on women’s economic empowerment. The logistic  marginal effect 
result  showed  that  positive  change  of  women  economic  empowerment  indicators  after 
intervention to OMFIs program; independent income generation(9.81e-04%), asset(7.38e-04%), 
saving(1.6*10
-2
%),  expenditure(5.96e-04%),  business  profit(2.49%)  and  employment 
opportunity(93.07%).  From the analysis result, the result showed that OMFIs services acting act 
as a key fulcrum to women  economic empowerment through socio-demographic variables that 
the yet negative impact variables become positive impact after intervention to OMFIs program. 
To test fitness of model the data in regression analysis results  the  various test models were used 
such  as  t-test  and  chi-2  test  for  the  descriptive  frequency  statistics,  and  Hosmer-Lemeshow, 
Wald and log likelihood ratio test models were used  for fitness of the data in logistic regression 
result  after model specification test. To determine reliability of data the  Cronbach”s alpha value 
was  determined  as  0.814  in  which  data  is  reliable  before  administration  of  questionnaires  to 
respondents. Since total of ten explanatory variables; four socio-demographic and six potential 
economic  explanatory  variables  were  included  in  the  regression,  model  specification,  multicollinearity  and  heteroskedasticity  test  are  useful  to  determine  interdependence  of  explanatory 
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variables and normality of error term test are necessary  to test significance of omitted variables. 
The  resultant  change  of  variation  during  intervention  on  women’s  economic  empowerment 
explained  about  80.02%  by  OMFIs  program  through  mentioned  explanatory  variables  that  the 
model fit data very well at p-value of, p=0.000 and chi-square of  247.34.