The Role Of Men In Achieving Women’s Economic Empowerment In Butiama District, Mara Region Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Despite various efforts by Government and NGO’s in empowering women, they continued to live in poor condition and dependent on men. The study was carried in Butiama district to examine the role of men in women economic empowerment. More specifically the study aimed at examining men’s attitude and support to women economic empowerment. Equally the study focused on assessing the levels of women economic empowerment with regard to women economic decision making, control of savings, income and loans, as well as ownership of assets including land. Lastly the study intended to find out factors affecting men’s participation in the process of women economic empowerment. A cross-sectional design was employed in data collection. A structured questionnaire administered to 120 married women with their spouse and a checklist of questions administered to focus group discussants and key informants were tools for data collection. Descriptive and inferential analysis was used to analyze data. The findings indicate that men provide startup capital to their spouse, they participate in economic activities and they also take care of the family when their wives are away. Men play very minimal role in WEE. Furthermore, CEI indicated that more than half of women in the study area attained medium level of empowerment. Additionally the findings revealed that women had power to control their savings, income, loans and other resources, while men control land and other production resources. Moreover, majority of men had negative attitude towards WEE and were in line with the statement that women engagement in economic activities is a wastage of time. WEE has no contribution to household income. Ordinal logistic regression model revealed that there was a significant relationship between men’s attitude and Women Economic Empowerment at p