The Non-income Dimensions and Determinants of Poverty of Members of Cooperatives in Central Zone of Tigray, Ethiopia

Poverty has been and remains today a contested area. There is unanimous agreement that it is a problem and that action is needed to address it. However, there is a disagreement over what constitutes poverty, the unit of focus (individuals or households) and the importance to be given to different dimensions of poverty. Disagreement about what constitutes poverty is in turn closely linked to disagreement about its causes and the weight to be given to these different causes. This, in turn, leads to disagreement about how best to address it. Likewise, in an attempt to fill the research gap observed in Ethiopia with the capability perspective, the present study was carried out at Central Zone of Tigray National Regional State with specific objectives of exploring the non-income dimensions and determinants of poverty of members of cooperatives in the rural areas. In order to attain this aim the study made use of the primary data collected by conducting formal household survey from representative sample respondents through personal interview using structured schedule. A two stage cluster sampling design was followed to select the primary sampling units (PSU). In the first stage, the list of all multi-purpose primary cooperatives from each selected woreda was used to identify that cooperative to be included in the survey using systematic random sampling method. Subsequently, the list of all multi-purpose primary cooperative members from each Tabia cooperative promotion office was used as a frame to select the sample households of members of cooperative in the rural areas of central zone of Tigray. The data collected from the survey on annual expenditure of households on consumption and non-consumption items were analyzed and comparing the non-food expenditure component calculated from the data available against the results of non-food expenditure component deflated to 2008 for rural Tigray, 47 sample households (27%) were poor and 127 sample households (73%) were found to be non-poor. The result of the logistic regression model revealed that among the 18 variables considered in the model, 9 explanatory variables are found to be significant up to less than 10% probability level. Accordingly, getting services from cooperatives (significant at less than 1%), dependency ratio, number of livestock owned, health status of household members, number of household assets owned by the household and body mass index of household members greater than or equal to 18.5 (significant at less than 5% level), and family size, ability of the household head to read and write and copping mechanism of the household in times of emergency (significant at less then 10%) were found out to have strong negative correlation with the households non-income poverty status.