Analysis of rural households’ resilience to food insecurity: Does livelihood systems/choice/ matter? The case of Boricha woreda of sidama zone in southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Working for enhancing capacities of people who repeatedly face food insecurity shock requires basic understandings about where their resilience lies. The current study is an endeavor made to understand the sources of rural households' resilience to food insecurity taking the case of Boricha woreda (district) of Sidama Zone in Southern Ethiopia. Boricha woreda is one of the few areas in southern Ethiopia with recurring food insecurity problem. In addition to understanding sources of resilience, the study analyzed the effect of differences in livelihood systems (livelihood zones to which a household belongs) on the households' resilience level. The study is based on cross-sectional field survey conducted by involving 420 households from three livelihood zones: Sidama Coffee, Sidama Maize Belt, and Agro-pastoralist livelihood zones. It was dominantly quantitative study supplemented by key informants' interview. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and descriptive statistics (percentage) were employed to analyze the data. Findings revealed that while differences in livelihood systems significantly explained variations in the level of households' resilience to food insecurity, Agro-pastoralist livelihood group is found to be a group with better resilience score on average terms. However, no significant difference is observed between coffee and maize livelihood systems. The PCA analysis revealed that while all turned to be significant, income and food access, agricultural assets, and agricultural technology adoption are the three resilience dimensions toping in terms of contribution to households' resilience to food insecurity. In terms of resilience status, very large proportion of the households (61%) is found to be less resilient and hence may not be able to withstand shocks. Providing context based evidence on the sources of resilience with special focus on rural households and examining the effect of livelihood systems/choices/on households’ resilience to food insecurity with application of ANOVA constitutes the novelty of the study.