Abstract
This survey study examines the effectiveness of a Rural Enterprise Programme (REP) in improving the livelihood of rural women in Ghana, using ex-anti and ex-post income determinants of the programme. Some 217 beneficiary women drawn from farm-based, agro-processing, traditional craft, agro industrial and petty trading economic sub-sectors selected to participate in the survey using snow-ball sampling method. Using cross-sectional design, questionnaire with open and closed ended items was used to collect data. The IBM SPSS Statistics (SPSS version 20) was used to analyze the data and the results were qualitatively presented in tables and charts. The study found that the various inputs and strategies used in the Rural Enterprise Programme to empower women included education and training that equipped beneficiary with literacy skills to enhance their entrepreneurial roles and labour market. The result showed that the women empowerment strategies employed by the programme produced intermediate and long-term outcomes increasing the nominal income of the participants, indicating improvement in the well-being of the rural women. However, the study identified a gap in accessing affordable finance (credit) and high cost of inputs which presented challenge to the responsiveness of the REP to the beneficiary rural women economic well-being. The study corroborates the literature on rural women empowerment in West African that evidence a high degree of vulnerabilities of rural women’s access to economic resources which are predominantly owned by men. The study recommends future ethnographically informed case study to investigate culturally responsive strategies that can work best in economically empowering women in African traditional rural men-dominated cultural and economic context. Key words: Rural women, economic empowerment, livelihood, well-being, strategies, rural enterprise programme, Ghana West Africa.
Highlights
There has been growing interest in the increasing working population with limited employment opportunities especially in the developing countries where there are relatively higher levels of unemployment
Gender entrepreneurial gap continuously widens in many economies where resources are predominantly owned and controlled by male population and this culminates into widening income gap between females and their male counterparts (World Bank Group, 2018)
The strategies revealed by the study were mainly carried out through skill training, increasing access to new inputs and credits, enhancing value-chain, workshops and seminars to introduce beneficiaries to new technologies and products
Summary
There has been growing interest in the increasing working population with limited employment opportunities especially in the developing countries where there are relatively higher levels of unemployment. World Bank Group (2017) projected that by the year 2030, the labour force in low-income countries will reach about 1.6 billion. Gender entrepreneurial gap continuously widens in many economies where resources are predominantly owned and controlled by male population and this culminates into widening income gap between females and their male counterparts (World Bank Group, 2018). Rural women in this category are the most affected since in most cases the focus is placed on reducing poverty in the urban centers. Williams et al (2018), argue that the difficulty in providing jobs for women in rural communities are as a result of the low level of literacy among women and the difficulty in accepting and adapting to other new forms of pursuing other economic activities
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