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<0.001
indicating high significant. The Multiple Regression model was used to analyze factors
responsible for influencing men’s participation in WEE. The study found that age of
men, negative attitude of men, low support in food and men traditional belief were
important predictors of men’s participation in WEE. Statistically the variables were
significant at (p<0.05, p<0.001 and p<0.001) showing high contributions to the model.
The study recommends gender mainstreaming and men inclusion in women economic
empowerment programs, through awareness creation of gender roles and intra-household
relationship.
