Food Security and Livelihood Strategies of Rural Farm Households with Focus on Female-Headed Households in Sasigga District, East Wollega Zone, Ethiopia
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Date
2019-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Ethiopia has a long history of famine. Regardless of the many attempts made to end it, the issue
of food security is still unresolved. Most of the previous inquiries on the issue have focused on
certain parts of the country known as “famine prone” which are affected because of prolonged
civil wars, recurrent drought, and other factors. Whatsoever the cause, food insecurity has a
disproportionate effects on different groups of people who have varying levels of access to
resources, local culture, and institutional support. Nevertheless, there was less inquiry on how
this affects the food security of certain disadvantaged groups of people in the regions assumed to
be food self-sufficient. Most food security studies neglected southwestern part of the country and
female-headed households (as a unit of analysis) in their approaches to deal with the issue. With
such background, this study was set to investigate the livelihood strategies and food security
status of female-headed households in Sasiga district of East Wollega zone of Oromia regional
state. The principal objectives were to examine the level of access to livelihood resources needed
to pursue different strategies and food security situation of householdsby utilizing Sustainable
Livelihood Framework (SLF). To this end, a mixed research design was employed to
systematically integrate the socio-economic data generated through survey, key informant
interview, FGDs and observation. A cross-sectional Data were collected cross-sectional
household survey of 390 (257 male and 133 female-headed) randomly sampled households. The
result shows, based on, all the different indicators used in the study, female-headed households
were more food insecure than male headed households. Such food security situation steamed
because of unequal access and control on productive resources and inability to properly utilize
the available resources which hindered female-headed households from pursuing viable
livelihood strategies and ensure their food security. Therefore; female-headed households,
though in a relatively abundant productive resource and less environmentally affected region, are
in a dire food insecurity problem. The study recommends that female-headed households‟ access
to productive resources should be improved. The agricultural technologies and social services
have to be designed to fit to the needs of female-headed households. Sustainable awareness
creation works on gender equality to members of the society shall be imperative.
Keywords; livelihood, local institutions, food security, farming households, female-headed
households
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Keywords
livelihood, local institutions, food security, farming households, female-headed households