Determining antecedents influencing beneficiaries income level from income generating programs / Norsuhada Sahedan

The income generating program performance have become a significant research area
since the introduction of productive welfare initiative in eradicating urban poverty just
over a decade ago in Malaysia. Researchers have studied and proposed improvement to
many factors such as entrepreneur traits as well as assistance facilities in order to
investigate its effectiveness in eradicating poverty. The critical issue is whether
entrepreneur traits and assistance facilities, do influence the level of income from
income generating program. Thus, this research aims to investigate the relationships
between assistance facilities which are training and in-kind transfer of business

equipment as well as entrepreneurs traits namely knowledge and skills, motivation, risk-
taking and passion to the beneficiary income level. Samples selected using stratified

random sampling yielded 250 usable questionnaires. The beneficiaries among the Azam
Bandar Program and the Kios Penjaja Bandar Program under Program Pembasmian
Kemiskinan Bandar participated in this survey. Pearson correlation was used to measure
the relationship between the variables. The findings revealed that there are no
significant relationships between all variables and income level except for passion.
Passion makes the strongest contribution in explaining the level of income with 0.358
beta value. The regression analysis also indicated 24.6% of the variance in the level of
income is explained by training, in-kind transfer, knowledge and skills, motivation,
risk-taking and passion. The implications of this study can be found in various aspects
including improvements in training implementation, establishment of mentoring
programs and determination of appropriate in-kind transfers. The discussion and
implications provided in this study would strengthen the body of knowledge with the
result of research and contributing to government agencies as well as policy makers
with recommendations in order to improve the program performance.