Resilience to drought and climate change disasters and its determinants in the heterogeneous pastoral Ethiopia

Abstract

Disastrous livestock losses have been documented over long periods in pastoral Ethiopia, and this challenge has remained unresolved. Nevertheless, this issue has received less attention than it deserves. This study estimated resilience of households to drought using survey data collected from 2756 households in the four pastoral regions. A two-step approach, along with factor analysis, was followed to estimate resilience by household categories, intervention groups, and regions. Following this, tobit model was estimated to identify factors influencing resilience. The results indicated, (1) the average resilience estimated for treated and untreated groups range from 0.32 to 0.90 and from 0.32 to 0.55 respectively. (2) The components of income and food-access, public services, social safety net, and liquid and non-liquid assets boosted the estimated resilience. To those components, daily per-capita income, expenditure, food-insecurity, health-post, mobility, time-efficient food-aid, livestock-size and diversity, and irrigated land contributed most. (3) The estimated tobit model indicated months of drought, whether households produce or purchase grain for consumption, among others, significantly influenced resilience. To improve resilience, the study advises diversified income, school-feeding, markets, water points, and timely food-aid. Over time, transformative investments in road and irrigation, augmented by technology and training for forage and crop production require attention.