Assessment on the Relevance of the Women’s Empowerment Program to the Socioeconomic Conditions of the Community Focus on The Organization for Women in Self Employment, (WISE)

Abstract

High proportion of people in economically deprived countries like Ethiopia often identified with uncivilized social and cultural beliefs and practices. One in kind is the prevalence of women inequality practices, which caused for the male-favored gender disparity statistics in most of the development indicator parameters. As the country’s economy grows, the proportion of empowered women also increases. However, this may be a very long term task for countries to achieve. Thus the global short cut solution designed by the international development support program interventions like the one being done by WISE Ethiopia, which is the focus of this study. The basic questions of this study are how significance the program components are to the socioeconomic conditions of the poor urban women? And what possible positive contributions it yields in empowering the target communities? In an attempt to address these questions, the study’s objectives identify how the program components are relevant and to what extent it helps in empowering the target women. To attain this, the descriptive quantitative research type designed with descriptive and correlation statistics employed in analyzing the survey data. Thus, the summary of the findings shows that the desired economic empowerment attained in most of the members, the decision making empowerment also attained in financial disbursement and family planning matters significantly, while partially achieved on the freedom of movement. Women also found to have sufficient exposure to media and high level of legal right awareness. Thus, the intervention needs to be strengthened both in depth and width.