Rural Households’ Resilience to Food Insecurity in Southern Ethiopia: The Case of Boricha Woreda in Sidama Zone
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Date
2018-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This dissertation concerns rural household’s resilience to food insecurity. It explores three
interrelated questions: sources of rural household’s resilience to food insecurity, food security
status, and household’s coping mechanisms. The study is based on cross-sectional field survey
conducted by involving 420 households and key informants interview. It adapted sequentially
explanatory mixed-method-research strategy. Stratified sampling coupled with simple random
and systematic sampling methods were used to draw a sample from study population. PCA,
ANOVA, descriptive statistics (mainly percentage), and Chi-square test were employed to
analyze the data. PCA revealed that while all turned to be significant, income and food access,
agricultural assets, and agricultural technology adoption are the three resilience dimensions
toping in terms of contribution to the study area households’ resilience to food insecurity.
Though the majority of the surveyed households (61%) are non-resilient in general, the inter
livelihood zones based analysis revealed that the household’s resilience vary based on the
livelihood systems. In this regard, the result of ANOVA shows significant effect, i.e., F-ratio is
significant at F (2, 417) = 4.991, p < 0.001. With regards to food security, the analysis of HFIAS
revealed that 62.4% of the served households have food insecurity situation that runs from
‘moderate’ to ‘severe’. On the other hand, the analysis of FCS showed that 42.4% of the
surveyed households have food security situation of below ‘acceptable’ threshold. Insights from
key informants revealed that the combination of factors has contributed to the food insecurity
problem of the Woreda including erratic rain, land fragmentation, and population pressure. The
ANOVA, which was meant to see if food security situation is the same across livelihood zones,
consistently indicated existence of statistically significant differences in mean food security
scores both in the case of HFIAS for F (2, 417) = 15.046, p < 0.001 and FCS for F (2, 417) =
6.626, p < 0.01. The study’s finding also indicated that households used a multitude of
consumption based coping strategies that run from compromising quality of food by eating less
preferred foods to food rationing. Repeatedly occurring food shortage has also forced some
households to use some of the resilience erosive coping strategies such as selling reproductive
assets, oxen, and even selling and/or renting out land holdings. The study also revealed the
existence of statistically significant relationship between the nature coping strategies utilized in
response to previously happened food insecurity related shocks and household’s resilience to
food insecurity with χ2 (1) = 98.149, P < 0.001. Policy implications emerging from this study
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includes 1) making protection of the livelihood assets of the households among the targets of
food insecurity problem based intervention. In context, this requires encouraging woreda level
concerned offices to report the true picture of food security situation and making humanitarian
food aid to play a role in reducing disposal of productive asset 2) promoting and supporting
income and /or livelihood diversification of the households, and 3) most importantly addressing
the problem of land fragmentation by carefully planning and implementing alternative
employment opportunities for the youth as a long run solution. Job categories such as animal
fattening, poultry, rural grain mills, construction materials such as sand mining, and providing
skill acquisition based training that enable the rural youth to get employment in urban areas and
in industries and facilitating employment then after are among the options to consider.
Strengthening and making the local development institutions such SDC, SDA, SMFI and the like
to work with their full potential is commendable as they can support the concerned line
Government Offices such as Sports and Youth Bureau in this regard. This policy option has a
role of decreasing the youth’s demand for parent’s land and hence contributing to have resilient
smallholders.
Key words: Resilience, Food Security, Coping Strategy, Livelihood Zone