Assessment of the Outcomes of Women Economic Empowerment Program: a Case of Hand-in-hand Eastern Africa Project in Kitui

Abstract

The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of Hand-In-Hand Eastern Africa’s (HIHEA’s) intervention on increasing women’s monthly enterprise earnings. Data for the assessment was collected from the direct beneficiaries through a structured questionnaire. SPSS was employed in the analysis, using a two way ANOVA and Paired samples T-test. The findings show that the project on women’s monthly enterprise earnings increased by 5.6 percent. The two-way ANOVA also revealed an interaction between respondent category and sub-county (implementation site) on women’s net monthly income. Further, the mean monthly income for treatment group is greater than that of comparison group in all sub-counties except for Kitui East where comparison group earned more, but with an overall P-value of 0.56. Only 17.7 percent change in monthly business income was registered when the difference in means was analysed. In conclusion, the effect of the project on women’s monthly enterprise earnings is relatively low, the variance in monthly enterprise earnings across different project locations and categories is statistically insignificant and HIHEA’s implementation logic seem not to be effective, since the objective of achieving an increase of at least 30 per cent in women’s monthly enterprise earnings was not achieved. It is recommended that the baseline enterprise income estimates to be captured in actual estimates and not interval rates, so that comparison can yield a significant effect of the project on income increase. The implementation sites and factors thereof should be further investigated to establish their influence on income increase, and if they can be replicated in other projects for greater effectiveness. This would necessitate re-alignment of the intervention logic.