Determinants of rural households graduation from Productive safety net program in doyogena woreda, Snnpr, Ethiopia

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.