Browsing by Author "Shimeles, Abebe(Ato)"

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    Informal Financial Institutions: Impact Analysis of Acord's Credit Intervention through Iddirs in Dire Dawa
    (A.A.U, 2000-06) Melles, Faniahun; Shimeles, Abebe(Ato)
    Quite a sizable number of people in urban Ethiopia make their living as informal sector operators. Among the many problems facing the sector, lack of financial intermediation by formal financial Institutions is one. The informal financial sector is of prime importance to informal sector operators in Ethiopia. Iddirs, iqqubs, etc, are community-based networks that provide financial intermediation of those sectors neglected by formal financial institutions. Having understood the importance of such institutions in credit intermediation for the fight against poverty, an international consortium of NGOs, called ACORD has opted in working through iddirs as entry media for microcredit Intermediation to the urban informal sector operators in Dire Dawa. This study assesses the impact of ACORD's microcredit scheme through iddirs on program participants. Besides, loan repayment performance along with assessing determinants of full loan repayment for the ACORD microcredit scheme in Dire Dawa is measured in the study. The institutional viability of the small loan program run through the iddirs in Dire Dawa is as well appraised. Since the credit market is generally believed to suffer from the problem of information asymmetry, the study at/empts to find out whether ACORD's iddir-based credit intermediation is sustaining serious impediments of the sort. Based on surveyed data on ACORD's iddir-based credit scheme, the study concludes that the majority of the program participants have benefited in most welfare measuring variables after the loan program. These are among others, changes in income, assets, nutrition, access to medical and educational facilities, as well as positive overall impacts on women. Regarding loan repayment performance, the scheme has maintained a more than 90% recovery rate over the last five years and is plausible by many microfinance institutions' standards in the country. Based on regression estimates, it is found that loan size, and the number of dependent are significant and positively related to loan diversion while use of bookkeeping and interest rates have shown negative Signs. on the other hand, estimates for the full loan repayment equation depict that the coefficients for other income sources, loan supervision visits, perceived cost of default, income from loan financed business and interest rate are all significant and positively related to full loan repayment. With respect to institutional viability, the provision of capacity building supports, initiatives connected to networking and intuitions building like the formation of CBO associations, the commitment of members, etc. are promising symptoms towards attaining institutional viability of the ACORD-initiated CBOs revolving credit scheme in Dire Dawa. Information asymmetry is less of a problem in the Dire Dawa iddir-based loan program, even in the face of high interest rates. This is so because peer pressure & social sanctions play very vital roles in mitigating both adverse selection and moral hazard along with the fact the financial services provided are kind of user-owned operations. It can be learned from this research findings that microcredit services are important means of alleviating poverty and impacting positive welfare shocks to program participants in Ethiopia. Informal financial institutions like iddirs are also a viable means of reaching the poor through small loan programs, given that they are provided some seed capital along with the necessary technical support that later on will qualify them to graduate to form a financial operator
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    Inquiry in to the Robustness of Poverty Indices
    (A.A.U, 1997-06) Woldemariam, Elizabeth; Shimeles, Abebe(Ato)
    The objective of the thesis is to inquire into the robustness of poverty lines and poverty indices. This research was undertaken to contribute to the work on poverty analysis by using the household survey data, to investigate to an area not researched before. The conclusion of the paper leads to policy recommendations. The data used is drawn from the Ethiopian Household Survey conducted for 15 rural sites and seven urban sites in 1994. The methodologies used include the calculation of four types of poverty indices by using two types of poverty lines constructed by the following methods i. e Cost of Basic Needs (CBN) and the Food Energy Intake (FEI), the FGT measures (i.e the Head-count index, the Poverty-gap Index and P2), SEN's index, Thons' index and CHU's index. The results obtained for both the rural and urban sites were further analyzed to see their robustness by cross tabulation method; by Persons rank correlation; regression method and by calculation of correlation coefficients. It was found that generally the CBN and FEI do not identify exactly the same households as poor. In the case of the head-count index, CBN and FEI are not robust for urban sites, they do not give the same number of poor, but for rural sites they are robust. The results of the various indices tested by different methods lead to the conclusion that poverty indices are sensitive to the type of poverty line used, especially SEN's index. Even using the same poverty line, all the indices do not give the same ranking in the majority of the sites. In the analysis of the correlates of poverty, both poverty lines give very close results thus they are robust in this case. The policy recommendations from this thesis are that the choice of a particular poverty line is important for targeting the poor