| Abstract: | RUSACCO has become one of the popular financial services that supports the
resource poor urban and rural people’s efforts of escaping from miserable poverty
and food insecurity problem. It has also been taken as one of the rural finance
that provides financial services such as credit and savings to enable the rural
households to improve their income and diversify their source of income that will
help them to minimize the probability that they will easily experience the food
insecurity problem. In this study an attempt has been made to see whether the
users of Yenesanet Fana RUSACCO union have been enjoying this benefit or not.
More specifically, an attempt has been made to see whether the RUSACCO
member households are able to improve their food security situation after their
involvement in the program. To this end, certain food security indicators have
been used and the users were approached to provide information along these
indicators by comparing the non-RUSACCO member and RUSACO member
households. In connection to this they were also made to describe their source of
food and cash income (agriculture and livestock produced, consumed and soled,
employment, transfer; remittance and wild food consumed were assessed). To this
end the sample of 71 RUSACCO member households and 60 non-RUSACCO
member households has been randomly selected and the data collected from this
sample have been analyzed mostly descriptively. Accordingly, it has been found
that the majority of the service user’s have observed positive change on the food
security indicators that have been used in this study after their participation in
RUSACCO program. Moreover, the great majority of the users included in the
study have reported that RUSACCO program has helped them in improving their
disposable income, living standard threshold, overall asset, the yearly farm
harvest, and on food intake in kilo calories, implying that the program is playing
some positive role in their household level food security ensuring efforts. However,
though they recognize this role of the financial services they receive from the
institution most of the users have voiced certain complaints on institutions
services like the size of loan, access to loan and loan repayment and schedule. |
