Abstract Understanding how men and women perceive multidimensional rural poverty differently is essential for achieving Sustainable Development Goals 1 (No Poverty) and 5 (Gender Equality). A mixed-methods approach was employed to survey 198 male-headed and 186 female-headed households in the Wolaita Zone of southern Ethiopia. Descriptive statistics were employed to assess deprivation in health, education, and living standards, utilizing the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). Inferential statistics were used to evaluate gender differences in perceptions using a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR). The results show statistically significant differences between male and female perceptions across all three dimensions. The SUR model revealed that male-headed MP influenced by education, credit use, market access, and extension services was statistically significant ( p < 0.01) across all three dimensions, while family size influenced the educational dimension ( p < 0.05), and off-farm income significantly empowered the health dimension ( p < 0.01). In contrast, education ( p < 0.01) and credit use ( p < 0.01) were the key variables that influenced women’s perceptions of all the MP dimensions. Extension services enhanced ( p < 0.05) both health and education but reduced the perception of living standards. Family size and market access significantly influenced the MP’s perceptions. This finding demonstrates the importance of gender-based approaches to poverty reduction in realizing SDG 1, 5, 4, 8, and 10. This suggests that it is essential to integrate gender-disaggregated information and local knowledge to develop policies to improve rural development in Ethiopia to be inclusive and sustainable, and policies should be based on gender-based vulnerabilities.
Godana et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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