Impact of Women Entrepreneurship Development Project (WEDP) on Women's Empowerment in Mekelle City, Northern Ethiopia

Abstract

Regardless of the strenuous efforts that countries have made towards reducing poverty and accelerating economic growth through formulating policies that favor SMEs, there is still a lag in knowledge and empirics regarding the presence of women-focused SMEs projects and the level of development. The objective of this study is to examine the impact of the Women Entrepreneurship Development Project on empowering women’s participation in micro and small enterprises in Mekelle city, northern Ethiopia. Women empowerment interventions were expressed in terms of access to loans and capacity building for the target women. Balanced panel data were collected from 300 women entrepreneurs by the Policy Study Institute of Ethiopia and the World Bank in 2014 and 2019 from seven sub-cities of Mekelle city. We ap-plied a difference-in-differences (DID) model to analyze the impact. Results show a positive effect of the project intervention on increasing average yearly profits (62.5%), average monthly sales (83.7 %), and in touch more hours in business activities per week(19hrs), and an increase employing additional labor (2) to perform their business compared to those who did not support by the project. These findings emphasize the project’s impact on women's economic empowerment, and clearly highlight the need to replicate and expand similar initia-tives for women without access to the project. Thus, orchestrated and demand-driven strate-gies and implementation modalities are quite necessary to empower the core competency of women entrepreneurship of the city, especially in post-war era.