Socioeconomic Impacts Of Rural Financial Intermediation Program Ii (RUFIP-II) Through Cooperative Sector

Rural Financial Intermediation Program II (RUFIP-II) is a financial intermediation program operating through Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) sector and RUSACCOs sector to accelerate rural financial service provision for unbanked sections of the community. RUFIP-II has started in 2012 and supposed to end in 2019. So it has been under implementation for 5 years and this is the right for socioeconomic impact of the program to be studied. Given this background, this study has been conducted in four regional states of Ethiopia, (Oromia, Amhara, SNNP and Tigray), with the objective of assessing economic impacts and social impacts of RUFIP-II. Simple random sampling is the method used to select the households/members from RUSACCOs. The RUSACCOs are sampled purposively based their performance and two RUSACCOs are selected from two unions in each region (one well performing and one poorly performing). Total of two hundred households are involved in this study – twenty-five member households from each RUSACCOs which makes fifty households from each region. All the households who are member of RUSACCOs have saving deposits starting from 300.00Etb to 120,000.00Etb per households. The credits from the RUSACCOs helped households to start new business and others to strengthen their existing business. Limited/lack of loanable fund is the biggest problem of the RUSACCOs to fulfill the credit needs of their members.