Socio-demographic determinants of poverty status in Uganda: evidence from Uganda National Household Survey data 2016

Abstract

Poverty is one of the key challenges that many countries are facing, and it is an invaluable requirement for sustainable development. This prompted a study to find out the socio-economic determinants of poverty in Uganda using UNHS data 2016. The study specifically looked at how demographic characteristics such as age of household head, household size and gender of household head impact on poverty status of a household and how socio-economic factors such as education level of household head, marital status and employment status of household head impact the likelihood of poverty in a family. The study adopted use of frequency tables to describe the summary statistics of different variables and used chi-square measure of association to test existence of relationship between each independent variable and the poverty status. The study further used a multiple logistic regression model to test significance of many independent variables on poverty status. This study found existence of a positive significant relationship between education level of the household head and the poverty status of a family (p<0.05) with educated family heads being less likely to be poor. The findings also indicated that the household size has a significant positive relationship with the poverty status of the household (p<0.05) with people with big number of household members being more likely to be poor. The findings also indicated that the age of the household head has a significant negative relationship with the poverty status of a household (p<0.05) with elder household heads being less likely to be poor than their young counterparts. The findings indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between the employment status of the household head and poverty status (p<0.05) with self-employed and paid employed household heads being less likely to be poor than those from the background of subsistence farmers. The study concluded that education level of household head, age of household head, employment status and household size had a significant influence on incidence of poverty in a family while the gender of the household head and the marital status had no impact. The study recommended that different family planning methods should be availed to the population at a free cost by government in order to check on the household sizes that have negative impact on poverty incidence.