Womens Access To And Utilization Of Rural Health Extension Service And Its Empowerment Effect Focusing On Sanitation And Hygiene Services In East Gojjam Zone Northwest Ethiopia

Access to sanitation and hygiene facilities and the practice thereof have become the most pressingrndevelopment and human right concerns of the 21st. The global community has pledged to achievernuniversal access to sanitation and hygiene by 2030 under the umbrella of SDG. The Ethiopianrngovernment has also promoted safe sanitation and hygiene through its rural health extensionrnprogram since 2004. The program has targeted women as both service providers and beneficiariesrnand aimed to empower them and the community at large. But, women’s level of access to andrnutilization of the said facilities is far from investigation. Women are disproportionately affected byrnpoor sanitation and hygiene due to traditional gender roles and biological factors such asrnmenstruation, pregnancy and nursing. The traditional gender division of labor makes women tornconduct more sanitation and hygiene related works which in turn contribute to the burden ofrnunpaid domestic work and limit their time for income generation, decision making and leisure.rnDespite such important links sanitation and hygiene have on women empowerment, empiricalrnevidences are negligible. This study is, therefore, aimed to assess the availability of sanitation andrnhygiene facilities, the practice thereof by women and its effect on empowerment. The determinantsrnof women’s sanitation and hygiene access and utilization are also other objectives of the study.rnThe study used mixed method research approach and data was collected from Dec 2018-Marchrn2019 in two districts of East Gojjam zone, Amhara region, Ethiopia. For the quantitative part, arntotal of 380 women have been selected using multistage cluster sampling technique and data wasrncollected using questionnaire. Interview and observation methods were also employed to generaternqualitative data that supplement the quantitative analysis. A total of 30 women have been selectedrnusing convenience sampling technique and data is analyzed using thematic analysis. Thernquantitative data collected through questionnaire is analyzed using IBM SPSS version 20 andrnStata /SE 14.0. Descriptive statistics is used to analyze women’s level of sanitation and hygienernaccess and utilization while proportional odds model and partial proportional odds model arernused to estimate the association between different factors and women’s sanitation and hygienernaccess and utilization level. The study found that a large number of women have high sanitationrnaccess (42.6%, n=162) but in terms of utilization a large majority of them (50.85%, n=193) havernlow sanitation utilization indicating a mismatch between sanitation access and utilization. Inrnrelation with hygiene access, however, a slightly larger number of women have medium hygienernaccess (46.6%, n=177) and utilization (53.2%, n=202) status. The PPOM estimation has identifiedrnmarital status, district, occupation, household income and wealth, participation in women healthrndevelopment team, frequency of health extension contact, household size and dependency ratio asrnthe key determinants of women’s level of access to sanitation facilities while the POM analysisrnshows that household size, access to sanitation facilities, and knowledge about the benefit ofrnlatrine utilization have significant association with women’s level of sanitation utilization.rnSanitation and hygiene utilization are found to have statistically significant association withrnwomen empowerment. A woman who has high level of sanitation utilization is, on average, 36%rnmore likely to be empowered than a woman who has low level of sanitation utilization. Similarly, arnwoman who has high level of hygiene utilization is, on average, 16% more likely to be empoweredrnthan a woman who has low level of hygiene utilization. On the contrary, statistical significantrnassociation is not found between sanitation and hygiene access and women empowerment;rnsignifying that the mere presence of sanitation and hygiene facilities has no effect on womenrnempowerment unless it is actually utilized. Therefore, it is recommended that the governmentrnshould strengthen its work towards promoting and monitoring not only the access to sanitationrnand hygiene facilities but also their utilization.

Get Full Work

Report copyright infringement or plagiarism