As far as the second dimension of women empowerment women’s level of

As far as the second dimension of women empowerment (women’s level of decision making power) is concerned, 13 decision making areas were identified and used to compute decision making index. To conspicuously examine the areas in which women vigorously involved in decision making, we disaggregated these decision making areas into three components: household consumption related decision making, household asset related decision making, and health related and others areas of decision making based on the empirical work of Aynalem (2016) with little modification. We constructed an index for each of the three dimensions derived from their respective areas of decision making by using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique. The likely responses in all the three components were: husband alone (coded as zero), husband and other (coded as one), joint decision (two), and wife alone (coded as three) in the original questionnaire. However, for index construction purpose, these response categories were re-coded into two main components such as wife not involved (coded as zero) and wife involved (coded as one). We merged the wife only and husband and wife jointly response categories together and re-coded them as wife involved. Likewise, we combined together husband alone and husband and others response categories and re-coded as wife not involved. In general, we constructed four indices (the fourth one is the composite index – the average of the three indices) to capture decision making power dimension of empowerment and employed all of them as outcome variables in the PSM model. Household consumption related index measures the level of women involvement in household consumption related decision making in three areas (purchase of daily food consumption items, milk use, and crop use). Hence, this index was constructed by these three set of items. The Cronbach  for this component of the index was found to be 0.663 indicating that the internal consistency or reliability of the set of items developed to measure the index is satisfactory. The second component (asset related decision making index) captures the level of women’s involvement in asset related decision in their households and is measured by a set of six decision making items: large household purchases such as furniture, electronic materials, and so on; buying and selling of livestock; land use or allocation; house construction/maintenance; renting land in/out; and borrowing money for investment. This component has a high level of internal consistency (Cronbach  = 0.823) showing that the set of items intended to measure the index have inter-correlation and measure the same construct (i.e. asset related decision making index). The third component (i.e. health related and others index) that measures the level of women’s involvement in household decisions related to wife’s health and visits is captured by four set of items including wife’s visit to nurse or doctor or health extension worker, family planning, visiting family or relative, and working outside the home. The measure of items internal consistency (i.e., Cronbach ) is found to be 0.834 indicating that the set of items designed to measure the index correctly measured the same construct (i.e., health related and others index). Finally, we constructed a composite index by taking the average of the three indices to measure the overall women’s decision making power at the household level. The higher value of the index for all components (including composite index) indicates a high level of women’s decision making power.