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Understanding livelihood strategy-poverty links: empirical evidence from central highlands of Ethiopia

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to disclose livelihood strategy-poverty links and gain a better understanding by developing typologies of rural households. Based on qualitative and quantitative data, we group households into different typologies and explore interactions. We identified six main agronomic strategies, four dominant livelihood diversification strategies, and income quartiles (proxies for poverty) using cluster and principal component factor analysis. We found that nearly 82% of the surveyed farmers in the study area belong to the bottom income quartiles while about 18% are on the upper quartiles. Households in the bottom income quartiles engaged in casual off-farm work and cereal-dominated livelihood strategies that tend to pursue subsistence farming by growing cereals and oil crops. Contrarily, farmers in the upper income quartiles adapted intensive agronomic strategies by integrating root crops, legumes, and vegetables with livestock. This was largely attributed to access to key livelihood assets such as land, livestock, education, and institutional support in which the upper quartiles were more endowed. Improving availability of the key assets for the bottom income quartiles might be a way out of poverty and ensuring sustainable development. It is crucial to recognize local-level heterogeneities of rural households when targeting development interventions.

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Notes

  1. Crop portfolios: cereals (‘tef’, maize, sorghum, barley, wheat); vegetables (tomato, onion, cabbage); root crops (potato, sweet potato); legumes (faba bean, field pea, chick pea, lentil, grass pea); perennials (eucalyptus); oil crops (linseed, Niger seed); livestock income (aggregated together from all animal types); off-farm income: casual (daily labour, petty trade, brokering, selling grass, selling fuel wood including animal dung); regular (grain trading, fattening, selling drinks, kiosks, livestock trade, motorized grain mills, handy craft, salaried employment); remittance; land rental income: income generated by renting out land. Gross revenues from crops or livestock products sold were estimated following the approach of Liyama et al. (2008). The same applies for off-farm work as it was difficult to estimate costs incurred to earn off-farm incomes.

  2. The exchange rate during the study period was 1USD = 11ETB (Ethiopian Birr).

  3. Cereals (‘tef’, maize, sorghum, barley, wheat); vegetables (tomato, onion, cabbage); root crops (potato, sweet potato); legumes (faba bean, field pea, chick pea, lentil, grass pea); perennials (eucalyptus); oil crops (linseed, Niger seed); fallow land; grazing land while animal types include: local cattle: (ox, bull, heifer, cow, calf); equines (donkey, horse, mule); sheep and goats; improved cattle.

  4. TLU is tropical livestock unit calculated as follows: An ox is equivalent to 1.1TLU, bull 1.1TLU, cow 0.8TLU, horse 0.8TLU, mule 0.8TLU, heifer, 0.5TLU, donkey 0.36TLU, calf 0.2TLU, sheep 0.09TLU and goat 0.09 TLU (Sharp 2003).

  5. Adult equivalent (AE) is calculated as follows: A person over 15 is equivalent to 1AE, 0.65AE for over 5–14, and 0.24AE for under 4 (Liyama et al. 2008).

  6. It was calculated by multiplying quantity of food reserved for consumption by the price given during the survey.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Danish Government and the Danish International Development Assistance (DANIDA) for their financial support. We would like to thank Dr. Chilot Yirga Tizale for his valuable comments during the field work and Dr. Carsten Nico Hjortsø for his critical comments on earlier draft of this manuscript. We also would like to acknowledge all individuals who assisted us during data collection and the cooperation of community in the study areas during the survey.

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Correspondence to Ali Mohammed Oumer.

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Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.

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Oumer, A.M., de Neergaard, A. Understanding livelihood strategy-poverty links: empirical evidence from central highlands of Ethiopia. Environ Dev Sustain 13, 547–564 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-010-9276-2

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