Rural Households’ Resilience to Food Insecurity in Lare District, Gambella Region, Southwest Ethiopia
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Date
2018-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Food insecurity is one of the critical challenges faced by Ethiopia’s rural poor, and it ultimately affects rural households by depleting its assets which are essential for their food access. The objective of the study is to analyze the rural households’ resilience to food insecurity in Lare district of Gambella region southwest Ethiopia. Two kebele (Mallow and Palbol) were selected purposively due to their susceptibility to food insecurity. The analysis was based on 171 respondent households from Lare District. Out of 171 respondents, 91 were from Malow kebele and 80 were from Palbol kebele, and were interviewed to identify their resilient capacity to food insecurity. The resilience was analyzed as a function of income and food access, assets, access to public services, social safety net, adaptive capacity and stability. The estimation of each bloc was done separately using factor analysis, logit model and ordinary least square model, and statistics package for social scientist version 20 was used for analyzing the data. The results of household food insecurity access scale showed that 12.83 and 87.13% of households were food secure and food insecure respectively. Out of 87.13% food insecure households, 2.34% were mildly food insecure, 1.75% moderately food insecure and 83.04% were severely food insecure. The resilience index results also show that 67% and 33% of households were non-resilient and resilient respectively. Based on the proportion of level of non-resilient households by Kebele, the Malow Kebele (38.5%) had greater non-resilient households than that of the Palbol Kebele (27.5%). This is because of inaccessibility to public services and damage of crops by flood. As indicated by the Beta coefficients, income and food access (B=0.471), access to public services (B=0.67), stability (B=-0.329) and adaptive capacity (B=0.200) were the most important dimensions of household resilience to food insecurity with significance level at (0.000). These are followed by social safety net (B=0.151) and asset (B=0.138) which played an intermediate role and would play important role in long-term in enhancing household’s resilience capacity. Therefore, interventions are needed to target non resilient rural households in study area by addressing resilience dimensions based on importance of each bloc of the resilience.
Keywords: Households, Resilience, Food Insecurity, Lare District