What is the Sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) Amidst of Covid-19? Its Impact on Household Income Level and its Determining Factors-Lessons from Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Background: Food security, malnutrition and poverty are some of the challenges that most of the sub-Saharan African countries face, with the coming of Covid-19 the sustainability of Village Savings and Loans Association which are formed to counter fight these challenges is questioned. Aim: The aim of this study was to assess factors associated with the Sustainability of VSLAs amidst of 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 was 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 P-value 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), and meetings (β=0.572, p=0.021), and occupation (β=-0.453, p=0.106), frequency of meeting (β=-0.507, p=0.049) were positively and negatively statistically significant predictors. Conclusion: Findings of this study shows that households with lower income earnings as one of the indicators of poverty are more affected by the pandemic than their counterparts. We recommend that the policymakers should continue and adopt, if they have not yet, programs that would help to assist low-income households, such as transfer of payments, which have proved to boost the income of the poor in many developing countries.