Challenges and Prospects of Vertical Farming for Sustainable Urban Development: The Case of Nifasilk-Lafto Sub-City of Addis Ababa
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Date
2020-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Urban community which community? enjoys food security when all people, at all times, have
access to nutritious, safe, personally acceptable and culturally appropriate foods, produced in
ways that are environmentally sound and socially just. One of the means for food security is
urban agriculture. This research focuses on urban agriculture with a particular to Challenges
and Prospects of Vertical Farming for Sustainable Urban Development: The Case of NifasilkLafto Sub-City of selected areas of Addis Ababa. The general objective of the study is to explore
the importance, challenge and prospects of vertical farming for sustainable urban agriculture
development for food security. Data was gathered from both primary and secondary data
gathered through qualitative and quantitative approaches. Representative sample household
from a total of 414 urban farmers in the sub city 90 representative farmers were randomly
selected. For the qualitative data nine key informant interviews were also conducted using a
purposive sampling technique from the relevant government organizations. A semi-structured
questionnaire, key informant interview ??? observation type of observation using photography,
document analysis, and satellite images were the methods employed for data collection. The
collected data was analyzed using a descriptive statistics for quantitative and qualitative data for
narrative analysis for the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The finding of the study
indicated that urban agriculture activity has effect on the natural environment especially on soil
erosion and water pollution as well as poses potential health risk due to contamination of
vegetables with toxic substances. Informal settlers occupied reserved area for urban agriculture
purpose by squatters. As well as urban agriculture activities in the protected area for green
development and uses are the two major challenges identified in the study area. The study
discusses the role of urban agriculture in connection with nutrition and food security, income
generation and job opportunity, environmental improvement and sustainable urban
development. Thus vertical farming as a new technological approach in urban agriculture
activity should be promoted as it can solve technically and technologically the urban community
problems.
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Keywords
Vertical farming, Challenges, prospect, sustainable, urban development