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An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa
BACKGROUND: Food security, malnutrition, and poverty are some of the challenges that most of the sub-Saharan African countries have been historically facing. With the coming of Covid-19 pandemic, the sustainability of the Village Savings and Loans Association which are formed to counter fight these...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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BioMed Central
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9152667/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35641969 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13303-9 |
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author | Chidimbah Munthali, George N. Wu, Xuelian Nambiro Woleson Dzimbiri, Mastano Zolo, Amon K.B Mushani, John Banda, Lazarus Obed Livingstone |
author_facet | Chidimbah Munthali, George N. Wu, Xuelian Nambiro Woleson Dzimbiri, Mastano Zolo, Amon K.B Mushani, John Banda, Lazarus Obed Livingstone |
author_sort | Chidimbah Munthali, George N. |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Food security, malnutrition, and poverty are some of the challenges that most of the sub-Saharan African countries have been historically facing. With the coming of Covid-19 pandemic, the sustainability of the Village Savings and Loans Association which are formed to counter fight these challenges is questioned. AIM: This study aimed to assess factors associated with the Sustainability of VSLAs amidst Covid-19 and its impacts on households' income levels. METHODS: An online cross-sectional design was conducted from November to January 2021, targeting VSLAs members in Mzuzu. A snowball and respondent-driven sampling technique were used to recruit the needful participants using a referral approach. IBM SPSS version 23 was used to perform descriptive statistics, Chi-Square, and binary logistic regression with unstandardized Beta (β), Odds Ratios (OR), and 95% Confidence Interval (CI) being taken into account with P-value set at 0.1, 0.05 and 0.01 significance levels. RESULTS: Our study finds that household income declined by 54% for those earnings belonged to ˂ MK5,000, as compared to 38% and 15% for medium (MK5,000 ≥ MK10,000) and higher (> MK10,000) income bands respectively. Our study shows that gender (β = 0.437, p = 0.094), age-group (β = 1.317, p = 0.000), education (β = 2.181, p = 0.047), share contributions (β = 1.035, p = 0.008), meetings (β = 0.572, p = 0.021), occupation (β = -0.453, p = 0.106), and frequency of meeting (β = -0.507, p = 0.049) were positively and negatively statistically significant predictors. CONCLUSION: According to the findings of this study, households with lower income earners, which is one of the indicators of poverty, are more affected by the pandemic than their counterparts. We urge that the Malawi governments should maintain and, if they haven't already, implement programs that support low-income households, such as transfer payments, which have been shown to uplift people out of income poverty in many developing countries. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9152667 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-91526672022-06-01 An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa Chidimbah Munthali, George N. Wu, Xuelian Nambiro Woleson Dzimbiri, Mastano Zolo, Amon K.B Mushani, John Banda, Lazarus Obed Livingstone BMC Public Health Research BACKGROUND: Food security, malnutrition, and poverty are some of the challenges that most of the sub-Saharan African countries have been historically facing. With the coming of Covid-19 pandemic, the sustainability of the Village Savings and Loans Association which are formed to counter fight these challenges is questioned. AIM: This study aimed to assess factors associated with the Sustainability of VSLAs amidst Covid-19 and its impacts on households' income levels. METHODS: An online cross-sectional design was conducted from November to January 2021, targeting VSLAs members in Mzuzu. A snowball and respondent-driven sampling technique were used to recruit the needful participants using a referral approach. IBM SPSS version 23 was used to perform descriptive statistics, Chi-Square, and binary logistic regression with unstandardized Beta (β), Odds Ratios (OR), and 95% Confidence Interval (CI) being taken into account with P-value set at 0.1, 0.05 and 0.01 significance levels. RESULTS: Our study finds that household income declined by 54% for those earnings belonged to ˂ MK5,000, as compared to 38% and 15% for medium (MK5,000 ≥ MK10,000) and higher (> MK10,000) income bands respectively. Our study shows that gender (β = 0.437, p = 0.094), age-group (β = 1.317, p = 0.000), education (β = 2.181, p = 0.047), share contributions (β = 1.035, p = 0.008), meetings (β = 0.572, p = 0.021), occupation (β = -0.453, p = 0.106), and frequency of meeting (β = -0.507, p = 0.049) were positively and negatively statistically significant predictors. CONCLUSION: According to the findings of this study, households with lower income earners, which is one of the indicators of poverty, are more affected by the pandemic than their counterparts. We urge that the Malawi governments should maintain and, if they haven't already, implement programs that support low-income households, such as transfer payments, which have been shown to uplift people out of income poverty in many developing countries. BioMed Central 2022-05-31 /pmc/articles/PMC9152667/ /pubmed/35641969 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13303-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Chidimbah Munthali, George N. Wu, Xuelian Nambiro Woleson Dzimbiri, Mastano Zolo, Amon K.B Mushani, John Banda, Lazarus Obed Livingstone An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa |
title | An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa |
title_full | An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa |
title_fullStr | An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa |
title_full_unstemmed | An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa |
title_short | An investigation of the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) amidst Covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa |
title_sort | investigation of the sustainability of village savings and loans associations (vslas) amidst covid-19 and its impact on household income levels: lessons from malawi, sub-saharan africa |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9152667/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35641969 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13303-9 |
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