Abstract:
The productive safety net program is primarily designed to provide cash or food transfers to
chronically food insecure households, in order to prevent household asset depilation as well
as create community asset. In doing so, Graduation of targeted household from the program
is the ultimate goal of the program. In the study area, almost half of program beneficiaries
were non-graduates. Thus, this study was conducted to analyze the determinant factors of
household graduation from productive safety net program in Doyogena woreda, Southern
Nations. A two stage sampling procedure was used to select six kebeles and 204 sample
households. The study was designed to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from
productive safety net program beneficiary households. Both primary and secondary data
sources were used to generate required information. The data were analyzed using
descriptive and econometric statistics. The descriptive analysis showed, only 38.2% surveyed
beneficiary households are graduated from the program. The result of binary logistic
regression model revealed that out of fifteen variables included in the model, eight
explanatory variables were found to be significant. Accordingly, age of household head,
education status, household dependency ratio, livestock ownership, off farm income, total
farm income, participation in credit and targeting mechanism were significantly influencing
households’ graduation from productive safety net program in the study area. The findings
also revealed that program beneficiaries’ lack interest to graduate from the program.
Partially family targeting, weak institutional linkage, low access to credit and poor
monitoring and follow up system of the productive safety net program affected the graduation
of the households. Thus, it necessities to promote improved technologies that increases
productivity of land and livestock, improve literacy, diversify and expand sources of income
of rural households, improve access to financial organizations, and provide capacity building
for beneficiary. The woreda also needs to exert considerable efforts to create awareness
among the program beneficiary on benchmark used and the time of graduation from
productive safety net program.
