Pastoralistss Response to Sedentarization and its Effect on Resource Use Pattern and Poverty Alleviation (The Case of Awra and Uwwa Woredas, Afar Regional State, Ethiopia)

Abstract

Like other East African livestock-keeping people, pastoralists in Ethiopia in general and the Afar region in particular are usually presented with horrific human and environmental crisis induced mainly by lack of appropriate policy and practice which could effectively tackle the threat of increasingly fragmented rangelands and barriers of mobility. Begging the question of lack of appropriate policy there have been hardly any researches on sedentarization of mobile pastoralists in Afar region along with an understanding of crop-livestock production and livelihood system that emerge when these pastoralists settle. This research has been conducted with the objective of analyzing the perception of these pastoralists (both sedentary and non-sedentary) towards sedentarization in relation to changing customary arrangements in resource use pattern and ownership and also to explore the effect of sedentary mixed farming on their livelihood. The research has employed multinomial logit model to extract pastoralists’ responses and propensity score matching methods to empirically examine the effect of sedentary mixed farming on livelihood. Eventually, the research has found out that there exists a strong and significant relationship between the household perception regarding sedentarization and the different covariates used on the multinomial logit model. In addition to this, the research has verified that households that have begun sedentary mixed farming are better in terms of consumption than their counterparts who haven’t. Finally, a number of useful recommendations have been made based on the findings.