Women Based Indigenous Social Protection among the Guji Oromo in Southern Ethiopia

Abstract: Chronic food insecurity is one of the problems that has plagued millions of Ethiopians for centuries. To solve this problem, in 2005 the Ethiopian government, in collaboration with development partners, launched a social protection program called the Productive Safety Net Program. This study evaluated the impact of the Productive Safety Net program on household food security in the Konso Zone, Kenna District, Southern Ethiopia. Data were collected from a total of 264 selected households using a multistage sampling procedure. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to assess program impact on household food security. A logit model was used to analyze potential covariate variables that influence household participation in the Productive Safety Net program. The study found that having livestock, credit, and a large amount of cultivated land had a negative impact on people's willingness to participate in the productive safety net program. Conversely, positively influenced by shock experience and agricultural extension. The Propensity Score Matching (PSM) resulted in matching 125 control households with 130 treated households. In other words, matching comparisons based on outcome variables were performed on these households that shared similar pre-intervention characteristics except for participation in the program. According to the PSM results, the program intervention raised the beneficiary families' total income and calorie intake by 277.31 kcal per capita/AE/Day) and 1789.42 ETB, respectively, as compared to non-beneficiaries. This study demonstrated how the program had a considerable impact on household calorie consumption and income. As a result, the focus of the development intervention should be on linking PSNP support with income-generating activities, vocational training, and credit access; designing labor-intensive public works that build sustainable community assets; regularly assessing PSNP's impact on food security and making timely adjustments

Drought‐related emergency assistance in the drylands is shaped by understandings of vulnerability that are often not commensurate with the socioeconomic dynamics that structure everyday life in pastoralist contexts. Forms of humanitarian assessment and targeting undertaken before the implementation of assistance programmes tend to be oriented towards vulnerability measurements and assessment criteria that focus on individuals or households. These approaches often fail to account for existing local systems of sharing, redistribution, and resource pooling. Recent research into locally‐led social protection, resilience, and livelihood change in the pastoral drylands highlights how pastoralists respond to crises through collective and networked practices, which take on diverse forms but are founded on a common understanding of vulnerability. Differences in how vulnerability is both understood and responded to mean that aid organisations and local communities often do not see eye to eye, which results in mistrust and inefficiencies. This article draws on research undertaken among pastoralist communities in the cross‐border area of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia to explore local conceptions of vulnerability. In drawing out implications, it asks whether humanitarian agencies might be able to move towards an alternative approach grounded in the more relational, networked understandings of vulnerability that shape life in the drylands.

The article uses survey and interview data from Boricha District in southern Ethiopia to assess the challenges and prospects of cash-for-work and food-for-work programmes for building households’ resilience to food insecurity. The findings show that the programmes are of little use for improving farmers’ food security. The analysis suggests that a human rights-based approach to social protection is needed as it sees social protection as an inherent social right, rather than as charity for beneficiaries. This approach is the correct direction to strengthen vulnerable groups’ capacity to respond to the social, political, economic, and environmental drivers of food insecurity and thus alleviate poverty and inequality.

The aim of this thesis is to identify the determining factors of food insecurity in two contrasting farming systems in the Sidama zone of southern Ethiopia. Using a mix-method case study research design, it is therefore filtering variables through which climate impacts affect food security. These transcend social, economic, and ecological factors. Beyond showing the degree of farmers vulnerability to climate change, the study discuses the multiple strategies used by food insecure farmers in responding the decreased access to food. However, the deployed strategies are not only differs between the study contexts and household characteristics but also they are less effective to deal with the climate change and other non-climatic factors. The thesis conclude that various forms of interventions that comprehend the local contexts and household characteristics and social protection are required to improve the farmers’ adaptive capacity to deal with climate change and thus to achieve long-term food security.