Assessment of the role of household empowerment in alleviating participatory poverty among rural household of Pakistan

Abstract

Poverty is viewed in different ways owing to its multidimensional concepts. A common view of poverty is that when one is unable to satisfy their certain basic requirements but it has been generalized that poverty is not only the lack of food and hunger, rather the low access towards other facilities by the government and inability to take part in the social or local decisions by community are also considered among the constituents of poverty. Therefore, the key aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of household empowerment on the participatory poverty of rural households. Primary data was used in the current study which was collected through multi-stage random sampling from the rural household of twenty-four villages in southern Punjab. For this purpose, a face-to-face interview of 600 households was conducted by authors. The household empowerment was measured through an index which was adopted from Abrar-ul-haq (An assessment of the role of household empowerment in alleviating poverty in southern Punjab, Pakistan (Ph.D. Dissertation), School of Economics, Finance and Banking, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 2017). The ordered logit model was used to analyze the impact of household empowerment on participatory poverty. The results of current study indicate that the household empowerment, remittances, agriculture occupation, agriculture experience, secondary occupation, household size and female-male ratio have a negative impact on participatory poverty. Therefore, based on the findings, the study suggested that participatory poverty may be reduced by improving household empowerment in the said area of southern Punjab, Pakistan.