Impacts of Productive Safety Net Program on Households ‘Calorie Intake per Adult Equivalent, Expenditure and Livestock Asset Holding; Empirical evidence from Eastern Ethiopia

Abstract

Chronic food insecurity is one of the main problems, which affected millions of Ethiopians for centuries. To solve the food insecurity problem and move away from the previous system of annual emergency appeals, the Ethiopian government in collaboration with development partners launched social protection program called productive safety net program. This study evaluated the impacts of productive safety net program on household poverty alleviation, by measuring the wellbeing of rural households using outcome indicators of the program i.e. calorie intake, consumption expenditure and livestock asset using cross-sectional survey data collected from 200 households in ECC-SDCOH facilitated kebeles of productive safety net program in eastern Ethiopia. Multistage stage sampling technique was used to randomly select representative household heads. Both primary and secondary data were analyzed using descriptive and econometric statistics. Applying a propensity score matching technique, the study found that the program has significantly increased participating households’ calorie intake by 30% (i.e., 856 calories), the consumption expenditure by 2.84% and livestock asset by 40% compared to that of non-participating households. The results of the logit model also indicated that program participation is significantly influenced by family size, education, marital status, dependency ratio, size of land holding and credit use. Therefore, to reduce poverty level of the country, due attention has to be given by the program to reducing gender disparity in poverty and sustained effort is needed to government-administered productive safety net program districts to accelerate the rate of poverty reduction. And the program should consider roles of significant variables in the selection of participant households for the desired impact under related locations.