!Ethiopia Proceedings

DRAFT Summary Proceedings of the Workshop on the BASIS/IDR Research Programme in Eastern Amhara Region, Ethiopia Held at Bahirdar, Amhara Regional State 17-18 June, 2003 Papyrus Hotel, Bahirdar Edited by Peter D. Little and Workneh Negatu “Assets, Cycles and Livelihoods (ACL): Addressing Food Security in the Horn of Africa and Central America” Research Project, Broadening Access and Strengthening Input Market Systems-Collaborative Research Support Program (BASIS-CRSP) and the Institute for Development Research (IDR), Addis Ababa University. This work is supported in part by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Grant No. LAG-A-00- 96-90016-00 through the BASIS CRSP. All views, interpretations, and conclusions are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the supporting or cooperating organizations. 2 Table of Contents Page Introduction and Overview 3 Peter D. Little and Workneh Negatu I. Research Methodology and Study Areas of the BASIS/IDR Household 8 Study in South Wollo and Oromia Zones, Amhara Region, Ethiopia Workneh Negatu II. From Poor to Poor: Cycles of Poverty and Drought Recovery in South 13 Wollo, Amhara Region, Ethiopia Peter D. Little III. Gender Dynamics and Household Drought Coping and Recovery 22 Strategies in South Wollo and Oromiya Zones, Ethiopia M. Priscilla Stone and A. Peter Castro IV. Food Self-Sufficiency or Income Security? Managing Human and 26 Physical Assets to Secure Livelihoods and Food Security in South Wollo, Ethiopia Michael Roth and Tewodaj Mogues V. Agricultural Technology, Food Production, and Household Food 33 Security in South Wollo and Oromia Zones of Amhara Region, Ethiopia Workneh Negatu VI. Factors affecting soil fertility management on small holder farms in 42 sub-Saharan Africa: a case study of the highlands of northern Ethiopia Samuel Benin, Simeon Ehui, and John Pender VII. Land Tenure and Food Security in South Wello (Wollo) and Oromiya 53 Zones, Amhara Region, Ethiopia Yigremew Adal VIII. The Performance of Micro-enterprises in Small Urban Centers of the 57 Amhara Region Tegegne Gebre-Egziabher and Mulat Demeke Annex A. Notes on Workshop Presentations and Discussion 70 Annex B. Workshop Agenda 83 Annex C. List of Participants 86 3 Introduction and Overview Peter D. Little, University of Kentucky and Workneh Negatu, IDR, Addis Ababa University In June 2003 the BASIS/IDR research program held a workshop in Bahir Dar town, the regional capital of the Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia. For more than three years the BASIS/IDR project has been conducting research in eight Peasant Associations/ kebeles of South Wollo (6) and Oromiya zones (2), the last two years under a research project, titled “Assets, Cycles, and Livelihoods: Addressing Food Insecurity and Poverty in the Horn of Africa and Central America.” The workshop provided an opportunity for the US BASIS and Ethiopian researchers to present their preliminary findings to an audience of policy makers and officials from the international donor, NGO, and government communities. What follows in this volume are summaries of the research that the BASIS/IDR project has been doing in the Amhara Region, as well as a contribution from another project in the region that is carried out by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). We are grateful to Dr. Sam Benin of ILRI for representing his collaborative program and for presenting a paper based on the study’s findings. Not all of the presenters at the workshop are represented in these proceedings. An examination of the schedule in Annex B shows the full list of presenters, but some of them did not have papers that were ready to include in the proceedings. Nonetheless, the organizers (Little and Negatu) are grateful to these individuals and the other workshop participants, many of whom are ‘on the front lines’ of addressing poverty and food security problems in the Amhara Region. We are very appreciative that they took time from their busy schedules to attend the workshop and contribute to workshop discussions. We are especially grateful to the Regional Bureau for Rural Development, Amhara National Regional State, and Amhara Regional Agricultural Research Institute (ARARI) for helping to organize certain sessions and inviting government officials and policy makers. 1. The Assets, Cycles, and Livelihoods Project The Horn of Africa (HA), including Ethiopia, includes some of the world’s poorest rural populations, most volatile political conflicts, and extreme cases of food instability (the following section is based on Little et al. 2002). The BASIS ‘Assets’ project builds on existing studies and databases in South Wollo and Oromiya Zones, Amhara National Regional State, and extends the Ethiopian work in the Horn of Africa to include analyses in another region, Central America (Honduras). External shocks—droughts in the Horn of Africa and hurricanes in Central America— have devastating effects on the lives and livelihoods of rural people. For some people, the passage of time permits recovery. Subsequent years of good rainfall and agricultural productivity can be sufficient to reverse trends of asset depletion and allow recovery from climatic and other disasters. For others, neither time nor markets offer the prospect of recovery. The objective of the BASIS ‘Assets’ project is to improve understandings of the ways in which asset cycles and poverty affect and are affected by factor market processes. As an empirical backdrop, the project highlights the theme of ‘shocks’ (climatic and other) to better assess the dynamics of these cycles under the harsh realities that confront some of the world’s poorest populations. The ultimate goal of the study is to identify policies that allow impoverished households to escape the debilitating cycles of poverty, asset depletion, and food insecurity. The South Wollo (Wello) area (see Map 1), often referred to as the buckle of the country’s famine belt, assumes an important — if not infamous — role in many of the global debates about food insecurity and famine, including those of noted economist Amatrya Sen. While the South Wollo study has generated several important conceptual and methodological advances, it also has raised important unanswered questions about the effects of poverty traps on shock (drought) recovery, the role of assets in shock mitigation, and the nature of risk management practices in the absence of well- 4 established markets. By emphasizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, the ‘Assets’ project in Ethiopia (South Wollo/Oromiya) builds on studies of asset cycles, shocks, and poverty in three innovative ways. It emphasizes a multi-round, longitudinal household study that nearly will cover the complete recovery cycle (2000-2003) following the devastating drought of 1999. In this research up to three individual economic agents (including spouses and older sons and daughters) are interviewed within each household, rather than just the household head; and each household is geo-referenced to allow spatial/GIS analyses of socio-economic patterns. Second, the project highlights intensive ethnographic work among a small sub-sample of households from the larger survey to capture important qualitative data and insights that cannot be captured through formal questionnaires. Finally, the household study has been supplemented by community-based assessments in all but two of the study sites, and by a regional market and micro-enterprise study in the region. 2. The Workshop Papers and Presentations The papers presented in this volume are only summaries of larger pieces of work conducted in the Amhara National Regional State (Ethiopia), many of which are still in progress. We asked that each presenter who was willing to share their paper, prepare a brief summary of their research findings, which often was an abbreviated version of a much larger research report. The objective here is not to present finished, polished papers but to provide readable versions that distill the most important research results. Our intended audience is the active network of BASIS and Ethiopian researchers and the larger Amhara regional development community who are interested in applicable research findings and policy solutions. In some cases, we even asked presenters to merely provide an outline of their presentation and findings, rather than wait to have them complete a longer paper. Most of us are still in the midst of our field studies; indeed, even a team of BASIS/IDR researchers went straight from the Bahir Dar workshop to the South Wollo and Oromiya Zone sites to continue interviews and data collection. When in doubt we erred on the side of timeliness for these proceedings, rather than scholarly and editorial refinements. The papers represent different aspects of the ‘Assets’ project, but most address two major, interrelated development problems: (1) food insecurity; and (2) poverty. The authors highlight different dimensions of these problems: gender (Stone and Castro), social and spatial (Little and Roth and Mogues), technological (Workneh), land tenure (Yigremew), micro-enterprise (or lack of) (Gebre-Egziabher and Demeke), and asset issues (Little). Once again, the findings are very preliminary but not surprisingly they consistently demonstrate how interrelated (and constraining) different aspects of poverty and food insecurity are. Poor households are labor, land, food, and oxen- constrained, so they are forced into unsustainable/survival types of agricultural

Load more