Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED)Development Planning and Research Department

ETHIOPIA PARTICIPATORY POVERTY ASSESSMENT 2004-05

byFrank Ellis and Tassew Woldehanna

15 October 2005

(This version of the PPA will be published by MoFED, Addis Ababa in 2005, and should be cited as ‘forthcoming’ until official publication.)

Frank Ellis Tassew WoldehannaOverseas Development Group (ODG) Economics DepartmentUniversity of East Anglia Addis Ababa UniversityNorwich NR4 7TJ, UK Ethiopiaf.ellis@uea.ac.uk tassew.woldehanna@wur.nl

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CONDUCT OF THE STUDY

The Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 was conducted by the Welfare Monitoring Unit (WMU) of the Development Planning and Research Department of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED), under the guidance of Ato Getachew Adem. Financial support was provided by the World Bank, UNDP and Development Assistance Group. External consultants were Dr Tassew Woldehanna of the Economics Department, Addis Ababa University and Professor Frank Ellis of the Overseas Development Group, University of East Anglia, UK. The Central Statistical Authority (CSA) assisted with the selection of Enumeration Areas for the study sites, as well as providing logistical support and preliminary data for the EAs from the 2004 WMS. Support was also provided by BoFED personnel in the regions. A PPA manual was prepared in October 2004 and training of research teams took place 15-20 November 2004. The fieldwork was undertaken between 25 November 2004 and 16 January 2005, a Debriefing Workshop was held on 3-4 February 2005 in Addis Ababa, and the Stakeholder Workshop was held on 14 October 2005 in Nazret.

The views and interpretations of qualitative data contained in this report are those of the authors and cannot be attributed to the Government of Ethiopia or the Ministry of Finance and Development.

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FOREWORD(draft subject to approval by State Minister)

I am pleased to write this foreword to the Ethiopia Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) conducted between September 2004 and May 2005 (EC 1997). The PPA was designed to permit the views of the poor to be taken into account in the formulation and implementation of Ethiopia’s poverty reduction strategy, known as the Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP). The SDPRP is entering its second cycle of implementation in 2006, and the findings of the PPA reported here have helped with the revision of the Program as well as with making adjustments to policies in order to accelerate the achievement of Ethiopia’s poverty reduction goals.

When it was decided to conduct a PPA, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development had several purposes in mind. The first purpose was to find out more about qualitative aspects of poverty and vulnerability in Ethiopia which do not necessarily come out clearly from the quantitative analysis of poverty that is based on the Welfare Monitoring Survey (WMS) and Household Income and Consumption Expenditure Survey (HICES) conducted by the Central Statistical Authority. The PPA should be seen as complementary to, not as a substitute for, the WMS and HICES poverty analysis. It provides insights into factors such as the causes and consequences of livelihood success and failure that may be difficult to obtain a clear picture about from the quantitative surveys.

The second purpose of the PPA was to assist the Ministry with monitoring the impact on people’s livelihoods and well-being of policies that are being pursued by the sector ministries under the umbrella of the SDPRP. For this reason, the PPA was conducted by the Welfare Monitoring Unit of the Development Planning and Research Department of the Ministry. The PPA helps to distinguish those policies that are working well, from those that have problems in their implementation, and also enables us to see what ordinary people think about progress that is being made in the different areas of social and economic change for which the government is trying to achieve sustainable improvements for the country’s citizens. The reader of this report will find much of interest concerning people’s perceptions about the relative success of policies in education, health, agricultural extension services, road building and so on.

The third purpose of the PPA is to discover ordinary people’s priorities for government action. The types of improvement or service delivery valued by ordinary people may sometimes differ from the priorities set by policymakers in central government, and it is therefore a useful exercise to be reminded from time to time of the preoccupations of citizens going about the daily business of trying to construct a sufficient livelihood for themselves and their families. The PPA can help a lot with understanding people’s concerns and priorities, since it uses methods that are designed to enable people to rank the things that they value most for improving their livelihoods.

The Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 was an ambitious and unique research exercise. Due to the size of the country and its great diversity of peoples and agro-ecological conditions, the PPA had to be unusually broad in its scope compared to similar exercises conducted in other countries. The PPA comprised a total of 45 research sites, of which 31 were rural sites and 14 were urban sites. Sites were selected according to multiple criteria in order to ensure the best possible coverage of the widely varying circumstances of people living in the different rural and urban areas of Ethiopia. A primary criterion was the geographical pattern of poverty

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incidence as found in the 1999-2000 HICES exercise. Secondary criteria then sought to achieve the best balance between vulnerable and non-vulnerable sites (where vulnerability was defined by reference to receipt of food aid), remote and non-remote sites, food crop and cash crop production areas; rural and urban areas, and representation of all regions. The PPA does not pretend to be statistically representative of Ethiopia in the same way as the quantitative surveys, and nor, indeed, would it be appropriate to think of it in that way. More important is the complete coverage of all regions, major towns and cities, and the diverse settings of rural Ethiopia.

In view of the size and geographical scope of the study, participatory research was conducted by 9 different research teams. Each team comprised 5 members, including an experienced and well-qualified Team Leader, and at least one qualified woman in each team. The teams visited between 4 and 6 research sites each, depending on the distance and travel logistics between sites that were broadly within reach of each other in different parts of the country. The field research commenced on 25 November 2004 and was completed by 16 January 2005, with a minimum of a week being spent conducting participatory enquires at each research site. The research teams received logistical and other support from BoFED and CSA personnel in each of the regions, and we are most grateful for this help.

I recommend this PPA report to you. It demonstrates many policy initiatives that have been moving forward in a successful way in Ethiopia over the past 5-10 years, but also it does not hesitate to discuss findings that indicate policy areas that have not been going so well, and that may require adjustments in order to be more successful in the future. The PPA is part of our ongoing efforts in MoFED to make available information so that we have a better understanding of poverty in Ethiopia, and so that positive discussion and debate about the best ways to move forward in poverty reduction are encouraged.

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CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations..............................................................................................................(vi)Glossary of Ethiopian Terms.................................................................................................(vii)Map Showing PPA Research Sites by Woreda and Town Names.......................................(viii)Executive Summary...............................................................................................................(ix)

Chapter 1 The Goals of the Ethiopia PPA 2004-05..............................................................1

Chapter 2 Research Site Selection and Team Organisation..................................................32.1 Criteria for Site Selection.....................................................................................32.2 The First Stage of Site Selection..........................................................................32.3 The Second Stage of Site Selection......................................................................52.4 The Third Stage of Site Selection.........................................................................72.5 Overview of Sites and Research Team Organisation...........................................8

Chapter 3 PPA Findings for Rural Communities................................................................103.1 The PPA Rural Research Sites...........................................................................103.2 Continuity and Change in Rural Ethiopia..........................................................10

3.2.1 Community Livelihoods........................................................................103.2.2 Cultural and Religious Factors...............................................................163.2.3 Land Tenure and Access........................................................................173.2.4 Gender Dimensions of Rural Livelihoods.............................................20

3.3 Well-Being Ranking and Livelihood Trajectories in Rural Ethiopia.................213.4 Vulnerable Groups.............................................................................................303.5 Mobility and Migration......................................................................................353.6 Institutions and Quality of Services...................................................................383.7 Governance, Empowerment and Taxation.........................................................43

Chapter 4 PPA Findings for Urban Communities..............................................................484.1 The PPA Urban Research Sites..........................................................................484.2 Changing Urban Livelihoods.............................................................................504.3 Well-being Ranking and Livelihood Trajectories in Urban Ethiopia................554.4 Vulnerable Groups.............................................................................................594.5 Migration and Mobility......................................................................................614.6 Institutions and Quality of Services...................................................................624.7 Governance and Empowerment.........................................................................67

Chapter 5 Policy Implications for Future Poverty Reduction.............................................69

References................................................................................................................................72

Annex A Table of Site Names and CSA Codes................................................................73

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 First Stage Site Selection for the Ethiopia PPA 2004-05.....................................4Table 2.2 Rural PPA Sites: Distribution by Region and Secondary Criteria.......................5Table 2.3 Summary Figures for Rural Sites by Secondary Selection Criteria.....................6Table 2.4 Urban PPA Sites: Distribution by Region............................................................6Table 2.5 Summary Figures for Urban PPA Sites................................................................6Table 2.6 Distribution of Rural Woreda for the Ethiopia PPA, by Selection Criteria.........7Table 2.7 Allocation of 9 PPA Teams Location and No. of Research Sites........................8Table 3.1 Level of Primary School Provision in the PPA Rural Sites...............................12Table 3.2 Frequency of Mention of Livelihood Improvements.........................................13Table 3.3 Frequency of Mention of Factors Worsening Livelihoods................................15Table 3.4 Religious Affiliation in Rural PPA Sites............................................................16Table 3.5 Farm Size Data in the PPA Rural Sites..............................................................19Table 3.6 Summary of Findings on Women’s Land Rights...............................................20Table 3.7 Summary Data on Well-Being Ranking, All Rural Sites...................................23Table 3.8 Summary Data on Movements Between Well-Being Groups............................25Table 3.9 Frequency of Reasons for Upward Movements.................................................26Table 3.10 Frequency of Reasons for Downward Movements............................................28Table 3.11 Distribution of Vulnerable Groups Across Rural Study Sites............................31Table 3.12 Comparison of Alternative Rankings of Institutions (31 Rural Sites)...............40Table 3.13 Land and Farm Income Tax Rates, Basona Werana woreda.............................46Table 4.1 The Urban PPA Research Locations..................................................................49Table 4.2 Frequency of Mention of Urban Improvements.................................................51Table 4.3 Frequency of Mention of Factors Worsening Urban Livelihoods.....................52Table 4.4 Frequency of Mention of Main Occupations Across Urban Sites......................53Table 4.5 Frequency of Mention of Different Occupations, by Well-Being Group..........56Table 4.6 Asset Status and Service Access in Urban Areas, by Well-Being Group..........56Table 4.7 Frequency of Reasons for Upward Movements.................................................58Table 4.8 Frequency of Reasons for Downward Movements............................................59Table 4.9 Distribution of Vulnerable Groups across Urban Study Sites............................59Table 4.10 Case-Study of a Migrant to Mekele Town.........................................................61Table 4.11 Comparison of Alternative Rankings of Institutions (14 Urban PPA Sites)......64Table 4.12 Comparison of Top Ranked Institutions between Rural and Urban PPA Sites. 65

LIST OF BOXES

Box 3.1 Holidays and Farm Work Example 1....................................................................17Box 3.2 Holidays and Farm Work Example 2....................................................................17Box 3.3 Generational Problems in Land Ownership..........................................................20Box 3.4 Example of an Upward Movement, Ato Kinde Ayenew......................................27Box 3.5 Downward Livelihood Sequences in Babu Village...............................................29Box 3.6 Example of a Downward Movement, Adanech Delele.........................................29Box 3.7 Vulnerable Female Headed Household.................................................................31Box 3.8 Landlessness and Vulnerability.............................................................................32Box 3.9 Vulnerable Disabled Girl.......................................................................................33Box 3.10 Vulnerable Children and Absence from School....................................................34Box 3.11 A Case-Study of Resettlement and Migration.......................................................36Box 4.1 Social Norms for Women’s Behaviour in an Urban Area.....................................54

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1 Rural PPA Research Sites by Woreda Name.........................................................11Figure 3.2 Rural PPA Research Sites by Kebele Name...........................................................11Figure 4.1 Urban PPA Research Sites by Town Name............................................................48

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AAU Addis Ababa UniversityACSI Amhara Credit and Savings InstitutionADLI Agricultural Development Led IndustrializationBoFED Bureau of Finance and Economic DevelopmentCSA Central Statistical AuthorityDA Development Agent (agricultural extension officer)DECSI Dedebit Credit and Saving InstitutionEA Enumeration Area (for data collection by the CSA)EC Ethiopian Calendar (has new year on 11 Sept, and for most of the year is 8

years behind; hence the PPA occurred during EC 1997)ESRF Economic and Social Research Foundation (Tanzania)FA Farmers Association (same as PA and rural kebele)FDRE Federal Democratic Republic of EthiopiaFFW Food for WorkFGA Family Guidance Association (NGO)FHHHs Female Headed HouseholdsGoE Government of EthiopiaHH HouseholdHICES Household Income Consumption Expenditure SurveyMoA Ministry of AgricultureMoFED Ministry of Finance and Economic DevelopmentNGO Non-Government OrganizationOCSI Omo Credit and Savings InstitutionPA Peasant Association (same as FA and rural kebele)PLA Participatory Learning and ActionPPA Participatory Poverty AssessmentPPR Participatory Policy ResearchPRA Participatory Rural AppraisalSDPRP Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction ProgramSNNP Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (Region)SSA Sub-Saharan AfricaWMS Welfare Monitoring Survey

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GLOSSARY OF ETHIOPIAN TERMS

araki local distilled alcoholic drink, can be very high alcohol contentbono public water post, standpipe or pumpchat green leaf with narcotic properties, chewed fresh (valuable export commodity to

the Arabian peninsular through the port of Djibouti)dado a sub-division of gare, comprising 5-6 families: a labour group for undertaking

community projectsdebo traditional labour sharing between families in the community, where the person

requiring labour typically provides food and drink in exchange for labourequib community or group-based rotating saving and credit associationgare in some places, a sub-division of gott, comprising 20-30 familiesgott in some places, a sub-division of kebele, comprising 80-120 familiesidir traditional community welfare organisation, that provides support to families

especially for funeralsinjera fermented pancake, made from teff or other food grain flour in varying

proportions (main prepared food in Ethiopia)kebele the lowest administrative level in Ethiopia, typically comprising up to 500

households; also known as the Farmers Association (FA) or Peasant Association (PA) in rural areas

tela local beer, brewed from available grains such as millet, barley or maizetimad land area measure (1 timad = 0.5 ha)woreda the fourth tier in the administrative structure of Ethiopia; above the woreda,

there is the zone, the region, and the country; of these woreda, region and national are levels of elected representation while the zone has a purely administrative coordination function

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MAP SHOWING PPA STUDY SITES BY WOREDA AND TOWN NAMES

Kurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa Chele

MetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMeta

ShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinile

DarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebu

HabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabroCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliya

EnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona Werana

DaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDale WenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenago

AngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoro

BenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso Sore

Limu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaMetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetu

DubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubti

AmbalajeAmbalajeAmbalajeAmbalajeAmbalajeAmbalajeAmbalajeAmbalajeAmbalaje

GimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbi

Lay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay Gayint

DehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehana

AnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresina

BambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasi

HabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabru

KonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonso

TelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTeltele

HawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede Tsimbela

Dire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire Dawa

HararHararHararHararHararHararHararHararHarar

JijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijiga

AsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayita

Addis (2)Addis (2)Addis (2)Addis (2)Addis (2)Addis (2)Addis (2)Addis (2)Addis (2)

AwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasa

Arba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba Minch

JimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimma

AsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosa

MekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekele

Sinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana Dinsho

ChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaCheha

DessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessieBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir Dar

NazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazret

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ETHIOPIA PARTICIPATORY POVERTY ASSESSMENT 2004-05

Executive Summary

Key Findings and Implications for the SDPRP

1. The Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 represents the most comprehensive canvassing of the views of ordinary citizens about the factors that effect their livelihood chances that has ever been conducted in Ethiopia. The PPA was conducted between November 2004 and February 2005 in 31 rural and 14 urban communities. It involved 9 research teams, each comprising 5 members, and each undertaking research in between 4 and 6 study locations.

2. This executive summary begins by briefly listing the main findings of the PPA, set within the context of a future revision of the 2002 Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP). A more complete treatment of these points can be found elsewhere in the summary, and, of course, the detailed analysis on which they are based is contained in the rest of the report. The Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 was an unusually broad exercise for this type of qualitative investigation, and it yielded a substantial amount of information useful for the formulation of future poverty reduction policies.

3. PPA findings reveal that considerable progress is being made throughout Ethiopia in delivering improved services to ordinary citizens. In rural areas, agricultural extension services appear to be improving quite fast, and primary schooling is available to all, although the quality of the educational experience remains lacking in important respects. In urban areas, progress is being made in services to poorer urban areas (water, sanitation, rubbish collection etc); however, there is variation between towns in terms of which services are improving, and which are not making such good progress. Roads are improving, reducing the isolation of rural areas, and making for better connections between towns for transport, exchange and market development.

4. The PPA reveals progress in other areas, too. Agricultural diversification is occurring successfully in some places, especially into fruit and vegetable production, and animal fattening. New and rehabilitated irrigation schemes receive positive mentions, and water pond construction is occurring across rural Ethiopia with mixed feelings so far regarding its efficacy. In respect of empowerment, progress in awareness of rights and ability to voice views is evident, although slower change is occurring in the reciprocal engagement by public officials in this opening up of society. Awareness of HIV/AIDS and its causes was evident in nearly all research sites, suggesting that education campaigns about the disease have reached widely across the country.

5. Poverty reduction in Ethiopia is guided by the SDPRP published in 2002 (Ethiopia, MoFED, 2002b). This strategy is characterised by its strong orientation towards agriculture and food security. The strategy has four pillars, that lead into policies grouped according to mainly sector headings: agriculture, food security, education, health, HIV/AIDS, roads, water and gender. The types of social and economic progress recorded by the PPA correspond closely to these SDPRP categories, indicating that the government has been fairly successful to date in converting SDPRP policy priorities into visible achievements on the ground.

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6. Nevertheless the SDPRP is based on premises that are debated in the literature, and that result in potential strategic gaps in coverage and connectedness between different processes of economic and social change. The basic premise is that agriculture can act as the leading sector for economic growth and poverty reduction. However, the possibility needs at least to be confronted, based on the PPA findings reported here, that agriculture could turn out to provide a less powerful motor for the achievement of these goals than is hoped. In an alternative view, the relegation of urban development to one minor sub-section of “cross-cutting issues” in the 2002 SDPRP seems unbalanced, and misses the significance of rural-urban interchanges and transitions in processes of rapid economic and social change. 1

7. The findings of the Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 thus provide a number of useful reflections on the policy priorities and strategic gaps of the 2002 SDPRP, and these are summarised briefly here as a contribution towards future revisions of the strategic policy framework for poverty reduction in Ethiopia:

(a) Agriculture embodies adverse trends as well as growth potential, and these can cancel each other out leaving standards-of-living in rural areas more or less the same into the future. The PPA shows that land sharing - i.e. sub-division of farms in order to absorb successive generations in agriculture - is the main adverse trend. However, others also apply: the market potential of higher value crops can swiftly be exhausted in the absence of rising urban demand, environmental deterioration is prevalent and costly to reverse, farm prices are always risky and unstable, international farm prices are on a persistent real downward trend.

(b) The PPA reveals that the future prospect that most worries people in rural areas is the continued pressure on the limited land resource. The SDPRP notion that “every farmer who wants to make a livelihood from farming is entitled to have a plot of land free of charge” (Ethiopia, MoFED, 2002, p.52) is in reality compromised by rural population growth and the slow rural-urban transition in Ethiopia. This problem is only temporarily, and in a minor way, alleviated by “organised resettlement” that has its own problems of dislocation and returnees, as revealed in several PPA rural locations.

(c) The relative absence of rural non-farm enterprise is a feature of the Ethiopian rural economy confirmed in the PPA findings.2 Few households engage in non-farm activities and there seem various reasons why this is so, including lack of encouragement by district and kebele administrators, fear of sanctions such as loss of entitlement to land (even though such fear is not grounded in public policy), social constraints on mobility especially for women, and low cash in circulation in remote rural areas (most people eat their own harvests).

1 The sub-section on urban development comprises 2½ pages of the 163 page SDPRP (Ethiopia, MoFED, 2002b, p.124-6)

2 And also confirmed by data for the same rural EAs as the PPA in the 2004 WMS, in which respondents stated on average that 95.6 per cent of their household incomes was obtained from agriculture, and only 1.7 per cent from household enterprises other than farming.

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(d) Yet in other countries and in some Ethiopian case-studies it has been clearly shown that farm and non-farm earnings reinforce each other for improving livelihoods. Cash generated in non-farm activities is used to invest in farm improvements including more use of purchased inputs. It is probable that household livelihood portfolios in rural Ethiopia are amongst the least diversified in Sub-Saharan Africa, and this means that little non-farm growth is occurring in small towns (woreda centres), and, by extension, little also occurring across the range of urban settlements up to regional level.

(e) It is difficult to gauge the direction of food security outcomes from PPA responses. Many households at PPA rural sites were found to depend on food aid or food-for-work in order to cover a regular annual deficit in their ability to feed themselves. Across rural PPA sites, 56 per cent of the 1,574 rural households included in well-being rankings were classified as poor or very poor, and these households were stated as growing only enough food on average to last 3 months. This overstates their food insecurity due to non-food production and other activities in which they are engaged; nevertheless the PPA sites did not, alas, convey a picture of diminishing household level food deficits in rural Ethiopia. 3

(f) Livestock disease and the inadequacy of veterinary services are a policy problem area emphasized in the PPA. Loss of livestock to disease was cited as one of the two top reasons causing downward spirals in the livelihood fortunes of rural families. The expected role and coverage of public veterinary services are unclear from the PPA reports, but seem mainly confined to woreda towns with little outreach to villages, especially those remote from district centres. Disease is, of course, not the only problem pertaining to the key role of livestock in rural livelihoods; shortage of fodder at the household level, and the shrinking of common land available for animal grazing were also widely mentioned in PPA rural sites

(g) The PPA reveals gradual gains in gender equality in Ethiopia, principally due to land access equality on death or divorce in the highland regions (rural areas), and increased acceptance of women working (urban areas). Nevertheless a deep conservatism pervades gender roles, severely proscribing what women can and cannot do, especially in rural areas. The proportion of female headed households is rising, and in rural areas their position is made more vulnerable by social conventions (ban on ploughing etc.) that cause them to have to sharecrop their land out to others. Much remains to be done to promote changing social attitudes so that women can contribute fully to the development process in Ethiopia in the future.

(h) The PPA finds that levels of mobility are fairly moderate in Ethiopia compared to other countries with similar per capita incomes and economic structures. This occurs due to lack of official encouragement; cultural norms that regard movement, especially by women, as socially undesirable; and high transport costs relative to people’s cash incomes in rural areas. Mobility refers here not just to permanent rural-urban migration, but to the general level of movement to and from near and distant places, for varying durations and purposes.

3 The 2004 WMS for the same rural EAs as the PPA found that 26 per cent of respondents had suffered from food shortages over the preceding 12 months.

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(i) Rather than being seen as beneficial for social and economic stability, this lack of mobility should be viewed as alarming for the lack of dynamism across economic space that it represents. It could be said of Ethiopia that the problem is decidedly not one of too much rural-urban migration; it is one of far too little coming-and-going between places and economic sectors, amongst which an increased rate of migration to urban areas is almost certainly desirable for long run economic growth even if the social ills that it creates are challenges that the government will have to rise to resolve in the future.

(j) It is the emerging generation of better educated youth that is placed in the worst position by the rigidities of the social and policy environment surrounding land, mobility, and urbanisation. A growing proportion of this generation is genuinely “landless” (no further scope for land sharing exists), yet non-farm options are limited, movement to towns is not encouraged, and low priority is given to providing them with basic support and services if they turn up in towns. The potential energy and productivity of urban youth and women is widely demonstrated in the urban PPA sites, but is relatively neglected by policy with potential big social and economic pay-offs to skills training (vocational training in practical subjects) and urban microcredit provision.

8. In summary the findings of the Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 suggests that future poverty reduction strategy requires a rebalancing of priorities so that promotion of agriculture is placed in a broader context of facilitating the transition from farm to non-farm occupations in Ethiopia. The risk of the current strategy is that gains in agriculture will be continuously eroded by farm sub-division and shrinking grazing land, resulting in rural household standards-of-living remaining more or less the same indefinitely.

9. In the end the only route out of this impasse is to encourage people to move out of the agricultural sector at a faster rate, and this will mean taking a positive rather than negative stance on urbanisation, including building urban growth into development plans, anticipating urban infrastructure problems in advance rather than waiting until severe urban squalor has occurred, facilitating rather than discouraging cross-sectoral mobility and migration, and allowing people to combine farm and non-farm occupations withour real or imagined fears about losing their land rights. Of course, these are relative, not absolute conclusions. However, they do have significant implications for the evolving balance between sectors and policy priorities in the future development of the SDPRP in Ethiopia.

The Goals and Themes of the PPA

10. The PPA was commissioned by the Ethiopia Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED), and is intended to inform the revision of the government’s Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (SDPRP), as well as to stimulate broader downstream policy debates about poverty reduction in Ethiopia.

11. In order to draw boundaries around the scope of the enquiry and to make sure that the data collected addressed these goals, a set of fairly precise research themes were identified. These selected research themes were as follows:

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(a) livelihood trajectories : achieving an understanding of the factors involved in improving livelihoods (upward livelihood trajectories) and deteriorating livelihoods (downward livelihood trajectories);

(b) vulnerable groups : identifying vulnerable social groups and the specific livelihood problems they confront that are susceptible to improvements by policy;

(c) mobility and migration : finding out about the role of mobility and migration in people’s livelihood strategies, including the factors that inhibit as well as those that are encouraging for human mobility;

(d) institutional priorities and service delivery : discovering the institutions, organisations and services that are most highly valued by ordinary citizens, and examining ways that the quality of service delivery can be improved for those institutions;

(e) empowerment and governance : reaching an understanding of people’s awareness of their basic rights as citizens, their ability to articulate their ideas to those in authority over them, and the way public administration works at different levels including taxation at local levels;

(f) gender dimensions of poverty : while every single topic in the PPA has a gender dimension, it is valuable to collect together the main understandings about the separate circumstances of men and women, especially with a view to strengthening the capability of women to contribute to the poverty reduction of themselves and their families.

Selection of Research Sites

12. Given the purposes of the Ethiopia PPA, research sites were selected in order to represent the diverse circumstances, opportunities and challenges faced by ordinary Ethiopians across the country, in rural as well as in urban areas. The criteria for site selection were:o representation of all administrative regions in Ethiopia (except those that could not

for security reasons be included in the PPA);o shares of research sites by region that corresponded to poverty incidence

proportions in 2000/01;o importance of gaining an understanding of rural-urban transitions, requiring cities,

regional centres, and rural larger towns representation;o selection of a distribution of rural woreda within regions that would provide for

variations in relative food security, remoteness, and cropping systems.

13. The second of these criteria meant that rural site selection closely followed rural population proportions in Ethiopia, since there is a close relationship between the absolute numbers of people classified as poor and the population of the different regions. Site selection then proceeded in three stages. The first stage determined the initial distribution of 45 sites between 31 rural sites and 14 urban sites. The second stage refined the choice of rural sites according to food security, remoteness and annual or cash crop criteria; and the choice of urban sites so that the capital of every region was represented. The third stage mapped the distribution of rural sites to zones, woreda,

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and enumeration areas (EAs) used by the Central Statistical Authority (CSA) for its large-scale sample surveys, the WMS and the HICE.

14. The research was conducted by 9 research teams, each doing between 4 and 6 research sites determined by the geographical distribution of sites and the logistics of moving between them. Each team comprised 5 individuals, of which one was the designated team leader, and at least one member in every team had to be a woman. In addition, for capacity building purposes, each team also had a junior member in order to increase the pool of available skills for undertaking this type of participatory investigation in the future.

15. This executive summary follows the structure of the full report. It begins with reporting findings from the 31 rural PPA sites under the headings of continuity and change; well-being and livelihood trajectories; vulnerable groups; institutions and quality of services; and empowerment and governance. This is followed by a parallel set of topics for the 14 urban PPA sites. A synthesis is then provided of findings and processes that link rural and urban areas, and open up the policy issue of rural-urban transitions. Finally, implications of the PPA findings for the future priorities of poverty policy in Ethiopia are set out.

Continuity and Change in Rural Ethiopia

16. It is appropriate to begin this summary of the research findings on a positive note. As a consequence of government efforts over the past decade, and more recently within the framework of the SDPRP, a lot is going on for the better in rural Ethiopia. Almost all research reports for the 31 rural PPA sites emphasise improvements that are happening in rural areas. The existence of these improvements is substantiated by triangulating data between key informants, community discussion groups, and a variety of different participatory methods that bring different perspectives to bear on circumstances in rural communities.

17. In the area of public services and infrastructure, increased school provision is the most often emphasized of all improvements. This is also the most valued improvement as indicated by institutional ranking exercises undertaken in the PPA. All 31 PPA rural sites had primary schools either on site or within 20-30 minutes walk of the EA. The grades covered by these schools varied, with 40 per cent being Grade 1-8 and 30 per cent being Grade 1-4. Schools had been improved through new provision, new classroom building on older schools, or rehabilitation of existing classrooms. Of course, not all is yet perfect in this domain (see “quality of services” below); however, observable progress is being made and is recognised as such by rural citizens.

18. The other area for which the government can claim considerable success as indicated by PPA findings is agricultural extension services. Indeed more rural PPA sites placed agricultural extension as their top improvement than those that placed schools at the top. Innovations in extension delivery are popular and Development Agents are widely respected in most communities. Changes for the better associated with agricultural extension included on-farm diversification (vegetable and fruit production), animal fattening, terracing for water retention, and new or rehabilitated small-scale irrigation schemes.

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19. A related innovation being widely promoted – water harvesting using ponds – provokes mixed reactions. Pond construction was popular in some places but considered a disaster in others, and not always did the ponds end up with a reservoir of water that could be used for cultivation when the rains stopped.

20. Other factors that were cited as contributing to improvements in rural livelihoods over the past 5 years included road improvements, access to potable water, and access to health clinics, although the latter attracted a lot of critical as well as some positive commentary. New livelihood activities were reported in 15 of the rural sites (just under 50 per cent of the sample), most of them to do with crop or livestock production.

21. In considering the processes that are improving people’s lives, there was one that has been found to be of considerable importance in other low income countries that was scarcely however mentioned in the rural community discussions in Ethiopia, and that was non-farm activities. Indeed, only in two out of the 31 rural research reports were non-farm income sources cited as being the source of improvements in household livelihoods. This is an important issue for future policy which is examined properly later in this summary.

22. While much of a positive nature has been going on over the past five years, especially in the improvement of extension services, social services (education and health), water provision, and road improvements in rural areas, there are of course also trends that have opposing effects on people’s lives. Undoubtedly, the adverse trend that most pre-occupies rural citizens is the declining size of their farms. More than half the study sites reported farm subdivision and fragmentation as the primary factor causing their livelihoods to get worse.

23. The rural PPA research reports provide some useful insights into the current land situation and its future trajectory. The average land holding across 17 sites that reported a community “average” was 0.75 ha. This comprised mean farm sizes in the range of 0.25 to 0.5 ha (9 sites) and a scattering of places with larger mean land holdings in the range of 1-2 ha (8 sites). Data from community well-being rankings suggested that “better-off” farmers had a mean farm size of 1.8 ha; middle farmers 0.5 ha; and “worse-off” or poor households were defined as those not possessing any land at all (zero land holding was reported in 18 out of the 20 sites that reported farm size data for poor households).

24. In Tigray and Amhara regions, the last major land redistribution occurred in EC 1983 (1990/91), and beneficiaries received 0.5 ha (for a married couple) or 0.25 ha (for an individual). The generations that have become adults since then are defined in their communities as “landless”, until they are able to acquire their parents holding at inheritance, or unless they marry someone who fortuitously already has entitlement to land. In practice, what occurs widely is “land sharing”, in which young married couples or unmarried individuals are allocated a part of their parents land to farm. This is self-evidently a process with practical limits: not everyone is able to land-share, and the allocation of land in this manner causes increasing tensions between the generations.

25. Aside from farm sizes, land shortage manifests in other ways too. “Grazing shortage” was the third most cited reason for worsening livelihood conditions across the study sites;

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while soil erosion, soil fertility decline and deforestation were amongst the top ten reasons. The pressure on land in rural Ethiopia is relentless, and will not go away, and cannot be solved by developments within agriculture alone. Potential achievements in raising the productivity of land through new varieties, new crops, better fertilizer use, and water harvesting schemes risk being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the continuing demands being made on what most people at the household level experience as a continuously shrinking land resource.

26. While women in Tigray and Amhara enjoy equal land rights, and this was widely recognised and positively looked upon in the PPA sites in those regions, the same does not apply in other parts of rural Ethiopia. The norm elsewhere is for women to gain land rights solely in the context of marriage, and for those rights to disappear if a marriage ends for whatever reason: death of husband, separation, divorce. It seems that in many places cultural norms prevail over legislative rules in this respect. The PPA reports reveal two main variants of the weak status of women with respect to land in Oromia and SNNP regions.

27. Perhaps the least favourable custom for women is the one by which “ownership” of the wife passes from the deceased husband to his brother, and if this arrangement is refused the woman loses all rights to her late husband’s land. There were 5 PPA rural sites (16 per cent) where this custom prevailed. The other prevalent custom is for the woman to have access rights to the land of her deceased husband only if she has borne him a son. Then two situations can arise: in the first, she has a son, and she can remain temporary custodian of the land until the son grows up; in the second, she does not have a son and must leave the land to her husband’s relatives and return to her parents homestead. There were 8 PPA rural sites (26 per cent) where these customary rules applied.

28. Not unexpectedly, cultural and religious factors play strong roles in rural communities throughout Ethiopia. For those of the rural sites that reported religious affiliation roughly 30 per cent were predominantly Orthodox Christian, 25 per cent were mainly mixtures of other Christian denominations, and 40 per cent were mainly Muslim. The Orthodox Christian research sites reported strict adherence to traditional prohibitions on farm work on fasting and saint days, although the number of prohibited days per month varied between 10 and 20 in different places. Custom and religious practice provide important social support in the face of adversity (for example, idir), but also act as conservative forces that prohibit women from undertaking certain tasks, inhibit mobility and migration, and in many places uphold unequal gender access to land.

29. In summary of the findings on continuity and change in rural Ethiopia, a mixed picture emerges from the PPA. On the one hand, rural citizens recognise changes for the better that are occurring due to government policies in rural areas. The most successful of these are improving agricultural extension services and primary school provision. For agriculture, progress has been made in on-farm diversification (especially vegetable production) and improved water management (irrigation, terracing, water harvesting). On the other hand, at the household level increasing pressure on land is a constant worry, as also is the loss of livestock to disease. The severity of land shortage in rural Ethiopia is a powerful thread running through all the research findings.

Rural Well-Being Ranking and Livelihood Trajectories

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30. Well-being ranking serves several useful purposes in the context of a PPA, and these may be summarised as follows:o it provides information on how communities themselves define relative livelihood

success or failure;o it provides a rough indicator of relative equality or inequality in rural areas, thus

helping policy to distinguish those who do not need help from those who do;o it permits upward and downward trends in people’s well-being to be identified,

including the causal factors that result in virtuous spirals out of poverty, or downward spirals into chronic poverty.

31. Across the 31 rural PPA sites, a total of 28 different criteria were used by key informants to define relative poverty and wealth (or ill-being and well-being). However, for any particular study site, 5-7 criteria predominated, so many of the markers for relative well-being were unique to just one or two places and were not relevant widely across rural areas. The most popular of all criteria was livestock holdings, followed closely by degree of food security defined as the number of months that a family was able to feed itself without recourse to begging, borrowing, food aid, or food-for-work.

32. Livestock ownership itself breaks down into 4-5 sub-categories such as cows and calves; oxen for ploughing; goats and sheep; donkeys or mules or horses; chickens; and camels. Also high in the list of criteria were land area available for farming, land renting (sharecropping) behaviour, and whether labour is hired-in or hired-out by the household.

33. Overall, across all study sites, only 11 per cent of sample households were classified as “better off” or rich; 33 per cent were classified as “middle”; and 56 per cent were classified as “worse off”, poor or very poor.

34. The key characteristics of being “better-off” in rural Ethiopia were ownership of moderate levels of livestock in most places (2-3 cattle, 2-4 oxen, 6 sheep or goats etc.); being food secure for 12 months; possessing land in the range 1.0 to 2.5 ha; sharecropping-in land, and hiring-in rather than hiring-out labour.

35. The middle category of households tended to be defined by owning a few livestock (1-2 cattle, 3-4 sheep or goats); being food secure for 7 or 8 months; possessing land in the range of 0.25 to 1 ha; and, on balance, not hiring-in or hiring-out land or labour.

36. The “worse off” or poor were identified by non-ownership of cattle, oxen or pack animals; their livestock, if any, being limited to 1-2 sheep or goats and a few chickens. The rough average of food security for this group came out at 3 months, although many of the PPA reports stated zero against this indicator. This links closely to land, which was also often stated as zero for this group. Finally, this group is characterised by sharecropping-out what little land they own, and by hiring-out rather than hiring-in labour.

37. In general, rural Ethiopia presents itself as relatively equal, manifested by the narrow ranges in farm size and livestock ownership for most study sites. When 3-4 ha is considered a generous farm size and 4 oxen or 2 donkeys makes you a rich person, then inequality is hardly the most pressing problem the society confronts. Indeed, it could

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easily be said of many parts of rural Ethiopia that “all people are poor and vulnerable”, since scarcely anyone enjoys a level and pattern of assets that would secure their livelihood in the face of unforeseen shocks or disasters.

38. A well-being criterion notable for its insignificance in the PPA rural sites was that of

access to non-farm earnings, either through ownership of non-farm business activities, or through external wages or salaries. Non-farm activities were only noted as a well-being criterion in 3 study sites, and in each of these cases it was a subsidiary or “second-order” criterion rather than one of the main ones emphasized by respondents. When it does feature, non-farm activity tends to comprise petty trading, grain milling, or retail sales (village kiosks etc.).

39. Participants in well-being ranking exercises were asked to identify households that had moved upwards or downwards across different well-being groups during the preceding five years. In addition, respondents were asked the reasons for these upward and downward movements, and later on the research teams followed up a sub-sample of households that had moved upwards or downwards in order to obtain detailed personal histories of how these movements had come about. Movements of this kind are called “livelihood trajectories”, and understanding how they occur can be helpful for refining policy priorities in support of positive, upward, trajectories, as well as seeking to avoid creating or reinforcing negative, downward trajectories.

40. Across all the case-study rural sites, for the 2,500 households that had been selected for well-being ranking, 310 households (12 per cent) were identified as improving their position, while 522 (21 per cent) were identified as going down, and 1,668 households (67 per cent) had experienced no significant change in their relative well-being circumstances in recent years.

41. The most prevalent of all reasons for moving upwards was stated as sharecropping-in land from other families. This has the benefit to the sharecropper of increasing the land area at his disposal, permitting more effective deployment of labour and oxen, and resulting in higher crop output. However, this opportunity for “doing better” usually occurs because someone else is in difficulty and finds themselves unable to cultivate their land due to lack of oxen, implements and labour. Interestingly, the opposite action (sharecropping-out) was one of the most common reasons stated for downward livelihood trajectories, and is closely associated with an apparent rise in female headed households in rural Ethiopia.

42. Other reasons for upward movements are interesting from a policy point of view. Engagement in non-farm activities were cited in a number of cases, comprising either non-farm business activities (e.g. trading or grinding mills or retail activities) or non-farm salaries (typically kebele or woreda officials) or unspecified “diversification of income sources”. This finding does not contradict observations made elsewhere in this summary that Ethiopia exhibits relatively few non-farm opportunities compared to other low income countries with similar or somewhat higher per capita incomes. Upward movements were a small minority of total cases across the case-study sites, and within this minority, non-farm activities of various kinds only amount to about 16 instances across 2,500 households.

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43. Encouraging in relation to policy initiatives of the past five years are the causes of upward movements associated with on-farm diversification. The reports for the different rural sites contain quite a few instances of farmers changing cropping patterns with the encouragement of extension agents, enabling them to take advantage of better market prices for new crops. This especially applies to diversified fruit and vegetable production, and is also associated with places that have benefited from new or rehabilitated small-scale irrigation schemes. The promotion of beehives as a source of income generation is also mentioned in a number of cases. Increased fertilizer use has a similar number of mentions.

44. Moving to the causes of downward movements in household well-being in the study sites, by far the most important reasons were death of the household head, livestock diseases and death, illness and medical expenses, large family size, and forced livestock sales (either for ceremonies or to pay for funerals and illnesses). With the exception of “large family size”, these reasons involve depletion of the asset status of the household, primarily in labour and livestock.

45. Other reasons frequently given for downward movements include old age, deficit in productive household members (lack of labour), land sharing (by parents with adult children), sharecrop-out, livestock dowry, declining soil fertility and “fertilizer debt” (inability to repay fertilizer loans).

46. The cumulative and sequential character of downward movements emerges clearly from the PPA fieldwork. For example, a harvest failure due to pest or disease or drought causes assets (usually livestock) to be sold in order to maintain household consumption; loss of these assets then gives the household less room for manoeuvre if another crisis occurs such as illness or death in the family; necessitating further asset sales to pay for medical costs, or funerals.

47. The role that livestock disease and death plays in increasing vulnerability represents a critical policy issue. The poorest and most vulnerable groups in rural society are defined to a considerable degree by their lack of livestock, in most places. Families that have otherwise been managing reasonably well become susceptible to downward trajectories or livelihood collapse when they lose their livestock to animal diseases or to death due to grazing failures in a drought year. As is discussed later in this report, animal health services to farmers seem to be lagging behind other services (extension, education, health) in coverage and improvements over the past five or ten years.

Rural Vulnerable Groups

48. Vulnerability can be defined as comprising “both exposure and sensitivity to livelihood shocks” (Devereux, 2002). In this, the sensitivity component is critical, since it denotes that a small adverse shock will have a large adverse effect on the survival capabilities of the people that it strikes. The phrase ‘living on the edge’ provides a graphic image of the livelihood circumstances that vulnerability tries to convey. Living on the edge evokes the sense of a small push sending a person or people over the edge, and it is just this knife edge between ability to survive and thrive, and sudden loss of ability to do so, that vulnerability seeks to describe.

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49. For a given set of livelihood risks, it is the varying asset status of households that determines how vulnerable they are to shocks. Vulnerable groups are so defined because they comprise people who are routinely found to have depleted assets, or an inability to deploy assets productively in order to secure a sufficient livelihood. The different vulnerable groups identified across the 31 rural PPA research sites were the landless, pastoralists, the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, female headed households, and children in poor families.

50. Vulnerable groups are often associated with downward livelihood trajectories. Old age, for example, causes downward movements in livelihood status. This occurs due to illness and medical costs, inability to continue heavy agricultural tasks, reduction in land size due to land sharing, and loss of a partner (husband or wife). Likewise, divorce, separation and husband death create female headed households that are prone to downward spirals in their fortunes due to lack of access to land, social prohibitions on acceptable female tasks, lack of mobility, sharecropping-out their land, or loss of their access to land altogether.

51. The rural PPA findings show that the causes and character of vulnerability are quite similar across vulnerable groups, and in most cases lack of livestock, land and labour are simultaneously implicated, although with some variations as to which of these may be the critical asset loss or deficit. For the disabled or chronically ill, lack of own able-bodied labour may be the determining factor; for pastoralists livestock loss leaves them unable to achieve food security.

52. Children as a vulnerable group bring out separate issues from those of the different adult groups. Children’s vulnerability to food insecurity is closely related to that of their parents or grandparents or other persons who look after them, and therefore the children of the other vulnerable groups – the landless, female headed households, the disabled or chronically ill – are themselves in the same vulnerable circumstances. However, children face other vulnerabilities too: being excluded from school due to the labour needs of their families; having to take employment in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed in the family; and often being excessively ill-treated by such employers who are indifferent to their progress or welfare.

53. In summary, vulnerability to acute food insecurity in rural Ethiopia is not just a general problem that affects all people equally in defined drought-prone geographical areas. There are social groups that are more likely to be vulnerable than others, and these groups may be food insecure even in places that are in other respects not regarded as requiring food security interventions. The main social groups identified as vulnerable are the landless, the elderly, female-headed households, the disabled or those with chronic illness, and pastoralists. In addition, children within all these groups are vulnerable, and not just to food insecurity, but also to exclusion from school and other factors with long term adverse consequences for their livelihood chances later in life.

Rural Mobility and Migration

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54. One of the central themes of the PPA was to gain a better understanding of human mobility in Ethiopia: the extent to which people regarded moving around and living in different places the norm; the social or administrative barriers to mobility where these can be identified; the reasons for mobility where it occurs; and the gains or losses to people’s livelihoods by engaging in more mobile lifestyles. For this purpose, mobility is used as a general term to describe all types of population movement including, for example, for trading or going to secondary school; while migration refers to seasonal, cyclical, or more permanent movements in pursuit of new jobs or resettlement in a different part of Ethiopia.

55. A general finding is that levels of mobility are fairly moderate in Ethiopia compared to other countries with similar per capita incomes and economic structures. In general, people stay in or near their communities, and travel relatively little and comparatively short distances. A lot of travel is of the type that can be accomplished there-and-back in a day (to market, or to visit relatives in an adjacent village, or to go to the woreda town to make some purchases). As noted above, the non-farm economy and labour market in rural areas is weakly developed, and therefore labour mobility associated with non-farm economic activities is correspondingly low.

56. Several reasons that emerge from the PPA rural site reports explain this lack of mobility. A first is that the cost of travel is relatively high in comparison to the ability of farm households to generate cash. A second set of reasons are social and cultural. There is a broad view in rural Ethiopia that migration represents a failure of some sort in relation to being able to exist adequately in one’s own community. A third set of reasons are to do with public policy and future land access. It is widely perceived, though not strictly grounded in law, that migration beyond a certain duration can result in forfeit of the land rights of the person concerned by the kebele administration, and the same can occur due to engagement in non-farm activities such as trading in consumer goods. This should only occur if the entire family has left the land altogether to live elsewhere, but it is possible that there is a lot of variation between kebeles in how these rules are interpreted.

57. Having stated these reasons why mobility and migration are fairly low profile aspects of rural life in Ethiopia, it is true of course that a certain amount of migration does take place, and the level and nature of this also emerges from the PPA rural sites. Amongst the 31 rural sites, seasonal or permanent inward migration was reported in 9 of them (29 per cent), while seasonal or permanent outward migration was reported in 27 of them (87 per cent). However, within this latter figure, 6 sites used the words “little” or “low” to describe the extent of such migration. Most migration, whether inward or outward, is seasonal migration for agricultural purposes, typically crop harvesting.

58. A different category of migration relates to resettlement. Some resettlement occurs due to formal government schemes, while some occurs spontaneously with families moving to places where they have heard that there is abundant land. Formal resettlement outwards was mentioned in 7 of the rural PPA sites (23 per cent), while inward resettlement was mentioned in 2 of them. In several cases, resettlement involved as many as 400-500 households. It was clear from these cases that resettlement represents mixed experiences for individuals and communities. Several communities reported quite high proportions of returnees from resettlement schemes; while being chosen as the recipient

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place for inward settlers is not popular with the recipient communities who felt that their own future access to land was being compromised.

59. In summary of the PPA findings on mobility and migration, it seems true to say that rural Ethiopians are, in general, reluctant movers. In part, this is simply a matter of economic opportunity. There are relatively few firm or reliable alternatives to dependence on farming and therefore people tend to look inwards rather than outwards for securing their livelihoods. In part, also, it reflects social and administrative attitudes and practices that tend to reinforce each other in regarding mobility and migration unfavourably. Migration that does take place is mainly for seasonal agricultural reasons, or in order to participate in official resettlement schemes that shift people from one place to another within the agricultural sector.

Rural Institutions and Quality of Services

60. The PPA research sought to identify the most important institutions in people’s lives in rural Ethiopia. The emphasis was placed on institutions or organisations that are regarded by ordinary citizens as helping them to improve their livelihoods, rather those having a purely cultural function in rural society. Nevertheless, this separation is not easy to make in practice since many social institutions possess both cultural significance and help people to manage their livelihoods through work sharing, or saving behaviour, or help with household costs at a time of crisis such as the death of a household member. The institutional analysis also needed to cover more formal organisations, especially those government agencies and services that have direct and indirect effects on people’s lives.

61. In participatory institutional ranking, there is always an underlying difficulty between the “importance” that the community attaches to an institution (for example, the importance people attach to primary education), and the “effectiveness” or “quality” of the working of the institution (the school may lack desks, books and teachers). In general, the “importance” criterion tends to dominate over the “quality” criterion in group discussions about ranking. Fortunately, quality issues regarding service delivery were asked about independently of the institutional ranking, and therefore a separate set of observations about service quality were generated by the PPA.

62. Using several different measures for summarising institutional rankings across study sites, primary schools, idir, and the kebele administration emerged as the top three institutions valued by rural citizens. These are closely followed by the agricultural extension system (development agents - DAs), peace committees (often stated as “elders committee” or other conflict resolution body), NGOs (both foreign and local), and formal religious institutions as being placed reliably in the top ten institutions according to different measures. A wide variety of local and international NGOs were found either to be currently operating, or had operated in the recent past, in the case study sites, and their efforts are typically highly regarded by ordinary citizens.

63. There is no doubt that schooling has the highest priority of all institutions in rural Ethiopia. However, the separate investigation of the quality of service provision reveals that much remains to be done to improve the quality of the educational experience for students. Lack of desks, textbooks, exercise books and qualified teachers was

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mentioned with respect to service delivery in numerous rural PPA sites. For those sites that reported the data, teacher:pupil ratios were in the range 1:60 to 1:100 in rural primary schools. A feature mentioned in 60 per cent of research sites was the absence of potable water in or near schools, meaning that toilet and wash facilities were minimal and students had to carry their own water to school.

64. Communities do not in general mind contributing to the provision of materials and labour time to school building; they do, however, find monetary contributions difficult, especially if they are in the poor or very poor social groups. Here, even minor contributions to building costs (10-15 birr per year) or to daily school costs (sometimes 1-2 birr per month for the school guard) can be an imposition on their already precarious livelihood circumstances, and may result in many of the poor not sending their children to school at all.

65. Like schools, primary healthcare facilities in rural areas are highly rated, but suffer from rather similar defects related to trained personnel and supplies (in this case, supplies of drugs). Out of the 31 rural sites, 15 had a health post on site or in close proximity to the kebele. In other cases, the nearest health post was often 10-15 km away. There were a few reports of good service at health posts (4 sites), but problems were reported at most other sites including negative attitudes of health workers, absenteeism, and lack of medicines.

66. The relative success of agricultural extension efforts has already been mentioned in this executive summary. Unlike other services, extension agents receive more positive than negative reactions both for the existence of the service itself, and its impact on improving livelihoods. In 16 of the 31 rural sites, extension agents either lived on site or nearby in the kebele and were available to give advice on a regular basis. At least 6 sites had access to the full range of 3 agents covering different specialisations. In some sites, groups of farmers had been to farmer field schools.

67. The position with regard to veterinary services is quite different from that regarding extension. The need for a responsive veterinary service is highly rated in communities and with good reason: loss of livestock to disease is one of the most cited causes for downward livelihood trajectories. However, the existing service appears not to provide livestock owners with a means of avoiding the loss of livestock to commonplace diseases. It is unclear from the PPA reports the extent to which government intends to provide a useful veterinary service, or expects the private or NGO sector to step into a gap in public provision. A re-examination of veterinary policy seems to be indicated by PPA findings in this area.

Rural Governance, Empowerment and Taxation

68. Governance refers to how power, authority, laws, rules, taxes, expenditures, the police, local and central government work for ordinary citizens and for poor people. While the word ‘government’ refers to the formal structures of central and local public office; the word ‘governance’ refers to how efficient, effective, fair and honest are the actions of public officers. The idea of governance applies equally to the community’s own leaders, as well as to external officials.

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69. There were three main aspects of governance that were investigated in the PPA. The first of these was people’s sense of ‘empowerment’ i.e. whether people feel that they are more able than before to express their views about things that affect their livelihoods, and to hold public officials to account if things are done badly. The second was about administration and the exercise of power and authority, and how restrictive this is on people’s options. The third was about taxes and fees in rural areas, covering what is taxed, how it is taxed, who gets taxed, and for what purposes taxes or fees or dues are required.

70. In summary of the PPA findings on empowerment, there are positive indications that ordinary citizens are permitted greater voice and have more awareness of their basic human rights than in the past. At the same time, the attitudes of officials tend towards the unresponsive, uninformative, and resistant to engaging in a more equal dialogue with citizens. To some degree this no doubt reflects real constraints on the ability to respond to complaints (for example, real budget constraints). However, empowerment requires dialogue and a predisposition on the part of those with responsibility to help if they can, as well as more openness about the reasons for being unable to respond where that is the case.

71. With respect to taxation, Ethiopia is fortunate at some time in the past to have successfully established the land tax as a form of rural taxation acceptable to rural citizens, and one that lends itself potentially to being progressive with respect to income. The rural PPA reports reveal few complaints about land taxes, or about market dues that are applied at local levels. The land tax is actually a combined tax that includes a farm size component and an agricultural output component; however, since these components are linked through a linear formula, they operate in practice as a single tax.

72. Land taxes vary in different parts of the country, but are generally in the range of 20 to 50 birr according to the farm size of the taxpayer, as well as their marital and family size status. While there is often provision in the regulations for higher taxes than this, the higher rates seldom apply, because few people have the farm sizes that would correspond to those rates. In addition to land taxes, citizens pay crop and livestock taxes when they take produce to market. These taxes are typically in the ranges of 2-4 birr per quintal (100 kg) for crops, 2-5 birr per head of cattle, and 0.5-3 birr per sheep or goat. Taxes on chat are higher at 2-3 birr/kg, and coffee tax was cited in one report at 8 birr per 100 kg.

73. Interestingly, the levies that attract adverse comments in villages are not these land taxes or market dues, but a range of other fees that do not seem to offer any relationship between tax paid and service provided (examples are the sports fee, red cross fee, and “newspaper” fee). These are in general small sums of money (1-2 birr), but they have the important characteristic that they hit the poor more than the better off. Indeed, for families who barely manage to generate cash (because they never have produce to sell) these small fees can be a severe imposition. It would seem sensible for government to review kebele level fees and “contributions” from the viewpoint of their impact on the poor, and perhaps to develop guidelines that would have the intention of excluding the poor from such charges altogether.

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74. It is apparent from the PPA rural research that local administration at the kebele level is often highly structured around organising people’s social participation and monitoring their movements and activities. This can be inferred from social structures below the kebele level observed in some places: for example, the gott, gare and dado. The purpose of these structures are to harness citizen’s energy more effectively towards collective community goals (such as building classrooms, clearing irrigation canals, installing water pipes etc.). In some places, these community obligations must be met in order to get a kebele permit to travel away from the community, for example, for an overnight stay, or for seasonal migration, or for visiting town.

75. While the positive effects of community obligation are recognised, the opposing danger of stifling individual initiative needs also to be considered. Elaborate social structures of this kind have the potential to inhibit choice, mobility, exchange and flexibility since everyone knows everyone else’s business, and there is a risk that any departures from “normal” behaviour are regarded as breaking one rule or another.

76. The forfeiting of entitlement to land if too much initiative is exhibited outside farming is a particular concern for poverty reduction policy. Not only can mixing farm and non-farm activities reduce vulnerability at the family level, it can also result in improved agricultural practices, and cause dynamic growth processes to occur in rural areas. This is so because it reduces risk, ameliorates the adverse effects of seasonality, generates cash that can be spent on farm inputs, and creates new economic activity. Actively discouraging people from leaving agriculture should properly have no place in a poverty reduction strategy.

Continuity and Change in Urban Ethiopia

77. Selected urban sites were in poor districts of 14 towns and cities. In most cases, these were places of low housing quality, including “shanty town” types of temporary shelter as well as houses constructed with mud walls and thatch or corrugated iron roofs. Even within such areas, better off households are observed to possess higher quality housing with brick or block or cement walls, cement floor, and good quality roofs. Urban sites were mostly located on the edge of towns since this is typically where poorer areas are found, nevertheless some inner city poor sites were also investigated.

78. Urban poverty analysis differs from the rural in important ways. Rather than livestock and farm land, the key assets are people’s houses and their access to urban services (water supply, sewerage, toilets, electricity, telephony etc.). Urban citizens depend on wage employment and self-employment rather than farming for their livelihoods. Seasonality is less important than in rural areas, although urban activities connected to agriculture (such as buying and selling coffee) follow the same seasonal peaks and troughs as the corresponding agricultural harvests. Education and health are, of course, public services that are equally important across both rural and urban areas.

79. The PPA findings reveal that efforts are being made to improve urban services and environments in all urban centres, but with differing emphases in different places and with more energy in some towns compared to others. The most frequently cited improvements are road upgrading, school construction, sewerage and sanitation installation, and provision of communal toilet facilities. Others that are cited a number

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of times include health posts, market place construction, water supply points, land made available for private house construction, increasing availability of private services (education and health), and programmes to train and provide start-up capital for urban youth.

80. The most prevalent complaints across urban PPA sites concerned the rising cost-of-living (relative to earnings), the prevalence of petty crime and theft, the extent of unemployment, and sanitation problems. The latter is a serious urban infrastructure problem noted in 9 out of the 14 urban PPA sites. It comprises a set of interconnected concerns: the absence of a piped sewer system (sometimes referred to as “drainage”), the presence of open drains, insufficient communal or private toilet facilities, insufficient garbage removal, and overall insanitary conditions that facilitate the spread of diseases.

81. The most prevalent urban occupation amongst PPA respondents is petty trading, and several points about this are worth noting. First, men and women do this equally, and women predominate in certain branches, for example injera selling. Second, particular types of trade (e.g. firewood) are dependent on sources of supply from the countryside, and may have environmental effects in rural areas that are a policy issue (deforestation). Third, petty trading is a fairly insecure livelihood platform since ease of entry by new traders means that margins tend to be pushed to the minimum level. Fourth, petty trading requires credit in order to acquire inventory, or to purchase basic equipment, and the ease of access to this at the micro level is a policy area which is being addressed successfully in some towns and not in others.

82. It is clear that living in urban areas can make a big difference to women’s lives. This does not mean that all social norms of gender roles disappear, but it becomes more acceptable for women to work, and for women and men to have separate control over the money they generate from working. In all sites, women were working as well as men, although men viewed this as a necessity rather than an acceptable social practice in some places. Women in several sites stated that their overall status had improved in recent years. Women emphasized credit and skills training in a trade (such as tailoring etc.) as their priorities for policies that would help them.

Urban Well-Being Ranking and Livelihood Trajectories

83. The criteria determining relative poverty and wealth in urban Ethiopia differs considerably from the rural well-being criteria. Two rather different sets of criteria prevail. The first set comprises the types of job or occupation in which household members are engaged. The second set comprises household assets which urban households might be expected to possess including house quality, access to public services, and consumer durables.

84. In general, the better-off in urban areas are characterised by owning small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), specialist trading (coffee, chat, contraband), government or NGO salaries, and remittances from abroad. The middle well-being group may be petty traders, junior civil servants, daily wage earners in construction, factories or other semi-skilled activity, drivers, engage in specialised trading (clothing, dairy products, retail), and renting out rooms. The worse-off group also engage in petty trade, daily labour

( xxvii )

(which is more likely to be casual and unskilled), prepare and sell injera, sell firewood, and do domestic work.

85. When it comes to asset status, substantial differences are found between the well-being groups. These differences centre on housing quality, access to services, level of education achieved, and ownership of consumer electronic goods such as radio, television and video. There are of course overlaps between groups with respect to some of these criteria. For example, some poor people may have low housing quality yet have good access to the main services via shared or communal provision. Likewise, people in the middle well-being group can have some well-being characteristics that are the same as the poor, and others that are the same as the better off.

86. In urban areas of the type investigated in the PPA there are close links between people of different well-being groups in access and provision of services. Those who can afford to pay for piped water, for example, often sell water to other households; and the same applies to those with an electricity meter. Most households irrespective of their relative poverty or wealth depend on public education and health facilities. This also means that all households confront the same sets of problems when the urban infrastructure is incomplete or deteriorating such as with lack of sewerage, open drains, potholed roads and so on.

87. Relatively few urban households selected for the well-being ranking exercise had changed status in the preceding five years. Only 13 per cent of households were identified as upward moving, and 24 per cent downward moving, the rest remaining in the same well-being category. This suggests a lack of much social mobility in urban Ethiopia during the period preceding the study.

88. The most prevalent reasons given for upward movements were remittances from abroad, growth of own business, children getting salaried jobs, salary rise and success at trading. The most important reasons for downward movements were illness (especially of the household head), family size increases, the decline in contraband trading that had occurred over the previous five years, asset sales to secure enough food, divorce, and increased competition in trading activities (caused by new entrants into petty trading).

89. There are more similarities for downward movements between urban and rural sites, than there are for upward movements. This is because illness, death and divorce set up similar sequences of downward spiral irrespective of where people live. Similar mechanisms also apply: a crisis event such as illness or death causes assets to be depleted in order to meet medical costs in the case of illness or due to the way assets are divided in the cases of death or divorce. With depleted assets, it becomes more difficult for people to engage in trade or business since they lack the cash to invest in inventory, and they may have lost their collateral for obtaining loans.

Urban Vulnerable Groups

90. The vulnerable groups investigated in the PPA urban sites were the youth, the disabled, the elderly, squatters, and those infected by HIV/AIDS. Vulnerability in urban areas takes the form of being almost continuously on the edge of insufficient food for daily maintenance, and often falling below that line. It also often involves crowded and

( xxviii )

insanitary living conditions in poor quality housing (rents can be as low as 0.25 birr a night), squatting in shacks made of plastic and scraps of wood, and exposure to personal danger (assault etc.). The factors that predispose people to vulnerability in urban areas differ from those in rural areas where lack of land and livestock are the chief causative factors. In urban areas, it is lack of education and skills, and inability to start-up self employment enterprises due to lack of savings or credit.

91. The key policy initiatives required to reduce vulnerability in towns are to do with education, skills and credit provision. In several towns, NGOs in particular have had considerable success with particular groups (youths, women) in setting up training schemes in certain skills and linking this to credit provision once the training is completed. This enables people to set up as metal workers, carpenters, builders, tailors etc. with some initial skills appropriate to the job rather than no skills at all. Simple book keeping skills are also appropriate to a wide variety of self-employment activities. Many of the unemployed youth stated that they wanted to take their education further, but no opportunities to do so existed, indicating that continuing education in urban areas, especially in vocational subjects, may require higher priority in educational spending in the future.

Urban Mobility and Migration

92. The PPA shows that individuals or families move to urban areas for many different reasons, or combinations of reasons. These are rarely simple decisions based on a single motivation such as hearing that there are wage jobs in a particular city. They are more likely to be complex decisions in which a combination of factors such as lack of access to land or family conflict in their home village provide the “push” reasons to migrate, and the prospects of finding an urban job provides the “pull” reason.

93. Some reasons appear straightforward but are actually quite complicated in social and economic terms. For example, an individual may be sent from a rural to urban area to “stay” with a relative. In fact, underlying this movement, there may be a food security problem at home in the rural area that is alleviated by reducing the number of people in the household, and the urban relative gains by getting domestic help in exchange for providing shelter and meals.

94. Aside from job search, prevalent reasons given for migration are education, family conflict, and applying successfully for a job (including job transfers where someone is moved from a small rural town to a larger urban area). Less common reasons include starting up business, illness or death in the home family, landlessness back in the village, accompanying husband, divorce, and entry into housemaid jobs.

95. It follows from these reasons, that migrants into towns are overwhelmingly young people when they first arrive in urban areas. It is young people who move for education, or to stay with relatives, or due to adverse family events back home in the village. Young people may also be attracted by the “lure” of the town. As noted in the previous section, young people can constitute a substantial proportion of vulnerable people overall in urban areas since they often lack assets and skills, and are unable to gain entry to business or salaried employment.

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96. The urban PPA reports support the rural reports in indicating that mobility and migration are relatively low key activities in Ethiopia compared to the experience in many other countries, where a great deal more coming-and-going between rural and urban areas occurs on a routine basis. The reasons for much of the migration that does occur are gradual and unthreatening to social harmony, as in education, visiting relatives, coming to be a housemaid etc. The other side of this low key and gradual migration is its indication of relatively subdued economic dynamism, since rapidly changing and growing economies tend to create a lot more mobility than slowly changing economies. It is unfortunately true that rapid economic and social change brings in its wake urban social ills (slums, crime, squalor etc) that subsequently need to be dealt with by public policy; however, this is a trade-off that needs to be taken on board if Ethiopia is to move forwards towards higher standards of living in the future.

Urban Institutions and Quality of Services

97. As in rural PPA sites, the urban research sought to identify the most important institutions in people’s lives in towns and cities. The same methods and the same caveats apply to this component of the research in urban areas as in rural areas. Two key points need to kept in mind: first, that the effectiveness of kebele government can be overstated if members of the kebele administration happen to be nearby or present in the institutional discussion; and, second, that “importance” and “effectiveness” tend to get confused in institutional ranking. Hence a high ranking of an institution by respondents is no guarantee that the institution is working well at what it is supposed to do.

98. Using several different measures for summarising institutional rankings across study sites, primary schools, the kebele administration, health, water and electricity supply, the police, idir, banks and telecoms emerged as the top nine institutions valued by urban citizens. Interestingly, municipalities receive relatively few mentions in urban rankings and when they are mentioned they are given low ratings. This could be interpreted as being indicative of the success of devolution of powers to the kebele level, bringing democratic accountability closer to urban citizens. On the other hand, this lack of mention and low prioritisation also means that citizens in the more deprived areas of cities see the municipality as a distant institution that has very little to do with improving their lives.

99. Some interesting comparisons with rural institutional preferences can be made on the basis of this data. The significance attached to schooling, health, the kebele, idir and NGOs carries across both rural and urban areas. However, in rural areas agricultural extension, religion (church and mosque), peace committees (conflict resolution), credit institutes (DECSI, ACSI etc.), and labour exchange institutions (debo) feature strongly in the top 10-12 rankings and they do not do so in urban areas. In urban areas these are replaced by water, electricity and telecoms services, and by the police and banks.

100. The existence and prioritization of urban services is not necessarily indicative of the quality of delivery of those services. Views about the quality of schools were more positive than was the case for rural provision. About half the urban sites reported schools where classrooms, textbook provision, and teacher availability were considered satisfactory by respondents. Generally, urban citizens have more immediate access to a range of health services than do rural citizens. This is because some combination of

( xxx )

health post, health centre, private clinic or public hospital is likely to be accessible to all urban residents. The quality of care across health institutions seems quite variable, however, as indicated by PPA complaints.

101. The urban PPA reports contain widely varying comments on the provision of other services such as potable water, toilets, sewerage (main drains), electricity and so on. Considerable variation in service provision and quality in different cities shows that much remains to be done in setting minimum standards of provision that are affordable and could be widely applied across all towns above a certain size. It is often NGOs, and not city governments, that achieve breakthroughs in the minimum provision of water or toilets to lower income areas of cities. While the help of NGOs is obviously to be welcomed in the task of providing better quality services for the urban poor, in the long run there is no substitute for improved performance of the municipal governments in this regard, and especially to ensure more evenness of provision across different towns.

Urban Governance and Empowerment

102. The summary view of empowerment in urban Ethiopia is closely similar to the equivalent findings in rural areas. There are positive indications that people have greater freedom of expression than in the past, and have more awareness of their basic human rights, but officials tend to stand aloof from ordinary citizens and to see their role more in terms of authority and issuing instructions than in terms of consultation and problem solving. More political plurality was evident in urban areas than in rural areas, with respondents reporting more than one (and up to 6) different political parties in 5 of the sites, while the remaining 9 sites had no political choice.

103. Scattered information in the urban PPA reports show that social control is quite strong in urban areas, as it is in rural areas in Ethiopia. Resident registration with the kebele is compulsory, and movement out of the kebele to go elsewhere requires an official leaving letter. How uniformly these requirements are pursued in towns, and the penalties for failure to comply with them are not clear from information reported by respondents.

104. The purpose of these devices perhaps needs considering as Ethiopia enters a period, hopefully, of more rapid social and economic change and more mobility. If registrations and permits have the purpose of enabling officials to deliver services better to people living in their administrative areas, then they can be justified, but if such devices exist in order to prevent people from exercising choices, or to make mobility more difficult then perhaps they need to be reviewed.

105. The urban PPA reports provide only fragmentary information on taxes and service fees paid by urban citizens. As for rural areas, taxation does not seem much of an issue for ordinary citizens, so one can assume that the tax burden is not too onerous in the various ways that it is applied. It is apparent that urban citizens pay property taxes, and in those places with proper sewerage systems, households pay a sanitation fee. The same range of market place taxes apply in urban as well as rural areas where agricultural produce is traded in formal market places. In addition, donkey embarkation and horse cart taxes were mentioned in some places.

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ETHIOPIA PARTICIPATORY POVERTY ASSESSMENT 2004-05

Chapter 1 The Goals of the Ethiopia PPA 2004-05

A Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) has been defined as “. . . .an instrument for including poor people’s views in the analysis of poverty and the formulation of strategies to reduce it through public policy.” (Norton et al., 2001: p.6).

The Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 follows this definition, and represents the most comprehensive canvassing of the views of ordinary citizens about the factors that affect their livelihood chances that has ever been conducted in Ethiopia. It was undertaken between November 2004 and February 2005 in 31 rural and 14 urban communities. It involved 9 research teams, each comprising 5 members, and each undertaking research in between 4 and 6 study locations. The PPA was commissioned by the Ethiopia Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED), and is intended to inform the government’s revised Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (SDPRP), as well as to stimulate broader debates about poverty reduction in Ethiopia. These overall goals can be broken into several subsidiary objectives, namely:

A. to engage ordinary citizens in real debates about the best way of implementing poverty reduction policies

B. to elicit specific types of information about poverty and vulnerability that are relevant to the better design of poverty reduction policies

C. to examine and order the priorities of the poor for action in different areas of social policy, in order to assist the prioritisation of resources directed to pro-poor efforts

D. to create a process by which those responsible for devising and discharging pro-poor policies, in central and local government agencies, become more engaged in active dialogue with citizens

E. to facilitate the engagement of multiple stakeholders in poverty policy debates: NGOs, local government, central government, donors, private sector

In order to limit the scope of the enquiry and to ensure that the activities conducted and the data collected addressed the overall goals of the PPA, a set of fairly precise research themes were identified in order to guide the choice of data collection instruments utilised in the fieldwork. These selected research themes were as follows:

(a) livelihood trajectories : achieving an understanding of the factors involved in improving livelihoods (upward livelihood trajectories) and deteriorating livelihoods (downward livelihood trajectories

(b) vulnerable groups : identifying vulnerable social groups and the specific livelihood problems they confront that are susceptible to improvements by policy

(c) mobility and migration : finding out about the role of mobility and migration in people’s livelihood strategies, including the factors that inhibit as well as those that are encouraging for human mobility

(d) institutional priorities and service delivery : discovering the institutions, organisations and services that are most highly valued by ordinary citizens, and examining ways that the quality of service delivery can be improved for those institutions

(e) empowerment and governance : reaching an understanding of people’s awareness of their basic rights as citizens, their ability to articulate their ideas to those in authority over

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them, and the way public administration works at different levels including taxation at local levels.

(f) gender dimensions of poverty : while every single topic in the PPA has a gender dimension, it is valuable to collect together the main understandings about the separate circumstances of men and women, especially with a view to strengthening the capability of women to contribute to the poverty reduction of themselves and their families.

PPAs are based on the family of participatory approaches that include participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and participatory learning and action (PLA). The term participatory policy research (PPR) has also been used in connection with PPAs (ESRF, 2002). The Ethiopia PPA was conducted according to accepted good practice in participatory methods of enquiry: allowing people to speak for themselves, encouraging them to articulate their own solutions to problems posed, ensuring inclusive participation by members of a group, being aware of group dynamics, being aware of things left unsaid as well as those stated, not imposing own views on the discussion, being sensitive to cultural inhibitions and so on. The full set of participatory principles and approaches utilised in the Ethiopia PPA are described in the PPA Manual (Ellis & Woldehanna, 2004, pp.3-7).

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Chapter 2 Research Site Selection and Team Organisation

2.1 Criteria for Site SelectionGiven the purposes of the Ethiopia PPA, the site selection process needed to provide a sufficient range of community circumstances and geographical spread of research sites in order to be regarded as adequately representing the diverse circumstances, opportunities and challenges faced by ordinary Ethiopians. The following criteria guided the site selection process, which was conducted in three stages: first, arriving at a regional and rural-urban distribution of sites; second, determining the features of the woreda (districts) where sites would be selected; and, third, selecting the woreda themselves and the sites within woredas that corresponded to enumeration areas (EAs) used in the Welfare Monitoring Survey conducted by the Central Statistical Authority (CSA).

The site selection criteria were:

o representation of all administrative regions in Ethiopia (except those that could not for security reasons be included in the PPA);

o shares of research sites by regions that corresponded to population and poverty incidence proportions in the Ethiopian population as analysed in the 2002 Poverty Profile for Ethiopia, based on 1999/00 national household survey data (Ethiopia, MoFED, 2002a);

o necessity to gain an understanding of rural-urban transitions, requiring cities, regional centres, and rural larger towns representation;

o selection of a distribution of woreda within regions in rural areas that would provide for variations in: vulnerability as indicated by the proportion of the population who regularly depend on

food aid; remoteness of location , as indicated by nearness or distance from main transport

routes; agricultural systems balance between annual crops (grains, pulses, oilseeds) and

perennial or permanent crops (coffee, enset, chat);o precise choice of research sites refined by selecting CSA enumeration areas (EAs), in

order to provide correspondence with quantitative data collected in the WMS and HICES household surveys in 2004-05;

o manageability of the PPA overall, taking into account the number and depth of the themes addressed, the time required at each site in order to accomplish the PPA successfully, the number and skills of the research teams and so on.

2.2 The First Stage of Site SelectionThe first stage of the site selection process is summarised in Table 2.1 below. The following steps are represented in the table:

(i) The data for rural and urban proportions of the population living in poverty, by region, were taken. These proportions simultaneously capture population shares across regions, but with a poverty bias. The practical effect was to weight population shares according to whether the poverty incidence in the rural and urban areas of a particular region were greater or lesser than the average poverty incidence for the country as a whole.

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(ii) The corresponding sites for each regional category were calculated, given a target total of 45 PPA sites (this number is discussed in Section 2.3 below). These figures were rounded to the nearest integer, so some regions or rural or urban zones within them were assigned zero sites.

Table 2.1 First Stage Site Selection for the Ethiopia PPA 2004-05

Contribution to Poverty(%) Calculated Adjusted

Region Rural Urban Total Rural Sites

Urban Sites

Total Sites

Rural Sites

Urban Sites

Total Sites

Addis Ababa 0.05 2.89 2.94 0 1 1 0 2 2Dire Dawa 0.10 0.25 0.35 0 0 0 0 1 1Harar 0.04 0.11 0.15 0 0 0 0 1 1Tigray 7.66 1.32 8.98 3 1 4 3 1 4Amhara 23.33 1.73 25.06 10 1 11 7 2 9Oromia 30.93 3.18 34.11 14 1 15 10 2 12SNNP 23.75 1.38 25.13 11 1 11 8 2 10B. Gumuz 1.38 0.05 1.44 1 0 1 1 1 2Somali 0.75 0.23 0.98 0 0 0 1 1 2Afar 0.49 0.08 0.57 0 0 0 1 1 2Gambella 0.24 0.06 0.30 0 0 0 0 0 0 National 88.72 11.28 100.00 40 5 45 31 14 45

(iii) The calculated distribution of sites was adjusted in order to fulfil the first and third criteria given above:(a) add sites so that all regions are represented (Afar, Harar, Somali, Dire Dawa)(b) add urban sites so that city and regional centres are represented (Benshangul

Gumuz)(c) subtract rural sites from the big regions to compensate for the added number of

urban sites above the calculated distribution(d) for civil security reasons, and because neither the WMS nor HICES were

undertaken there in 2004-05, Gambella region was excluded from the PPA.

According to projections from census data the estimated rural-urban proportions of the total population are 83 per cent rural and 17 per cent urban. However, in Table 2.1 the PPA site shares are 70 per cent rural and 30 per cent urban. This departure is justified, first, by a decision to include all regional administrative centres in the PPA; and, second, by the aim of the PPA to understand mobility, migration and rural-urban transitions in Ethiopia. It can also be argued that the rural-urban distinction is only useful up to a point: many regional centres are rural cities and towns that constitute important nodes of seasonal, service and business opportunities in rural areas. Gaining an understanding of the role of such places in rural livelihood strategies was an important function of the Ethiopia PPA.

Finally, the addition of a second site in the capital city, Addis Ababa, was justified by the inadequacy of a single site for capturing the diverse manifestations of poverty and vulnerability in the capital city. One of the capital city sites was purposively selected to represent a location where recent migrants from the countryside had established themselves in the capital.

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2.3 The Second Stage of Site SelectionA combination of applying the other criteria with the manageability criterion resulted in 45 sites being selected for the Ethiopia PPA. Each site produced a rural or urban community report, comprising a wide ranging investigation of the themes set out in Section 1 above. These 31 rural and 14 urban community reports provided a very substantial quantity of qualitative data, that are analysed in this report by aggregating, identifying patterns, summarising commonalities of experience, and examining variation and its causes in different places.

The 31 rural sites were cross-checked against the further criteria of relative vulnerability (food secure or food insecure), remoteness (near transport routes or remote from them), and predominant cropping systems (predominance of annual or perennial crops like coffee or chat). Since perennial crops only represent about 10 per cent of Ethiopia’s agricultural output, this secondary criterion was given less weight than the other two. In addition, perennial crop sites were not combined with the vulnerability criterion, since in general these crops are not grown in the areas of Ethiopia that are most vulnerable to food insecurity. When these and earlier factors are considered, the distribution of rural sites turned out as shown in Table 2.2.

Table 2.2 Rural PPA Sites: Distribution by Region and Secondary Criteria

Rural Region

Vulnerable Not VulnerableTotals

ByRegion

Annual Annual Perennial

Remote Not Remote Remote Not

Remote Remote Not Remote

Tigray 1 1 1 0 0 0 3Amhara 2 2 1 2 0 0 7Oromia 2 2 1 1 2 2 10SNNP 2 2 0 0 2 2 8B. Gumuz 0 0 1 0 0 0 1Somali 1 0 0 0 0 0 1Afar 1 0 0 0 0 0 1Totals by Criteria 9 7 4 3 4 4 31

In summary, the 31 rural PPA sites were selected using secondary criteria, such that there were 16 vulnerable and 15 non-vulnerable sites (where vulnerability was defined according to food insecurity or food security); 17 remote (off-road) and 14 non-remote (near or on-road) sites; and 23 mainly annual crop sites with 8 mainly perennial or cash crop sites. The summary matrix of this selection outcome is provided in Table 2.3 below. The resulting research locations have a small bias towards food insecurity and relative remoteness, consistent with the overall aims of the PPA to discover the circumstances of those with difficult livelihood prospects in rural Ethiopian society.

For the 14 urban communities, a main criterion was to represent each region by its administrative centre. In addition, for 3 regions, a second large town was chosen in order to obtain information about urban centres located on transport routes within mainly rural areas. The distribution of the resulting list of urban sites is shown in Table 2.4.

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Table 2.3 Summary Figures for Rural Sites by Secondary Selection Criteria

Vulnerable 16Non-Vulnerable 15

Remote 17Not Remote 14

Annual Crops 23Perennial Crops 8

Table 2.4 Urban PPA Sites: Distribution by Region

Regions/Urban No. Centre AdditionalAddis Ababa 2 Addis Ababa 1 Addis Ababa 2Dire Dawa 1 Dire Dawa city  Harari 1 Harari city  Tigray 1 Mekele  Amhara 2 Bahir Dar DessieOromia 2 Nazeret JimmaSNNP 2 Awasa Arba MinchB. Gumuz 1 Asosa  Somali 1 Jijiga  Afar 1 Asayita Total Urban Sites 14    

In summary, the most important criterion in selecting urban PPA sites was to represent the administrative centre of all regions in Ethiopia, thus reflecting the importance of the relative autonomy of regions in the constitution, and potentially permitting useful policy insights into similarities and differences in the urban livelihoods of the poor across regions. In addition, it was considered appropriate to select two different sites in the capital city, Addis Ababa given the size of the city and the many distinct types of urban community that are represented there. Finally, it was felt that there was scope to bring into the PPA 3 additional urban sites representing large regional towns that are important as market centres in rural areas, and as nodes in the national road transport system. The summary figures are given in Table 2.5

Table 2.5 Summary Figures for Urban PPA Sites

Capital city 2Regional centres 8Regional large towns 3Total urban sites 14

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2.4 The Third Stage of Site SelectionThe third stage of the PPA site selection process was to map the foregoing distribution of rural sites spatially to zones, woreda and enumeration areas (EAs) used by the CSA for its large-scale sample surveys, the WMS and the HICES. This stage then yielded a precise list of woreda and named EAs that constituted the PPA field research programme. Evidently, this mapping was not expected to reproduce with pinpoint accuracy the entire range of criteria set

Table 2.6 Distribution of Rural Woreda for the Ethiopia PPA, by Selection Criteria

(Note: Zone is underlined, Woreda is in italics, and (Kebele) is in brackets and italics )

Rural Region

Vulnerable Not VulnerableAnnual Annual Perennial

Remote Not Remote Remote Not Remote Remote Not Remote

TigrayE. TigrayHawzen

(Debre Medhanit)

S. TigrayAmbalaje

(Amede Weha)

NW. TigrayAsegedeTsimbela

(Debre Abay)

0 0 0

Amhara

Wag HemraDehana

(Guled Mariam)

S. GonderLay Gayint

(Shebet)

N.WolloHabru

(Mehal Amba)

S.WolloDebresina(Tach Wale)

Agew AwiAnkesha

(Buya Eyesus)

N. ShewaBasona Werana(Bakelo)

E. GojamEnemay(Shibetam)

0 0

Oromia

E. HarergheKurfa Chele*

(Aeda Roba)

BorenaTeltele(Kalo)

E. HarergheMeta

(Kebenawa Kuter)

W. HarergheDarolebu

(Jelebo)

W. ShewaCheliya

(Legdeamna Wayu)

BaleSinananaDinsho

(Kaso Shekmera)

W. WellegaGimbi

(Chuta Sedu)

IllubaborMetu

(Meru Ekele)

JimmaLimu Kosa

(Babu)

W. HarergheHabro

(Kuter 04)

SNNP

Konso SWKonso SW

(Gaho)

WolaytaBoloso Sore

(Weyibo)

HadiyaSoro

(Weshieba)

KembataAngacha

(Hawora Arara)

0 0

SidamaDale

(Muticma Gorbie)

Bench-MajiBench

(Endekale)

GuragheCheha

(Gasorena Chancho)

GedeoWenago(Chichu)

B. Gumuz 0 0Asosa

Bambasi(Shobera)

0 0 0

SomaliShinileShinile(Birak)

0 0 0 0 0

AfarZone 1Dubti(Arado)

0 0 0 0 0

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out in preceding paragraphs. The criteria were a guide, but actual sites varied from these exact specifications because on inspection they brought together differing mixtures of criteria, or for other practical reasons. The final selection of rural woreda within which fieldwork was conducted is shown in Table 2.6 above.

2.5 Overview of Sites and Research Team OrganisationThe full list of 45 PPA research sites, including the CSA codes for the sites down to the EA level is provided in Annex A to this report. The geographical distribution of the sites is shown on the map provided after the contents pages at page (vi) above. Rural sites are indicated by the lighter markers while urban sites are indicated by the darker markers. The map reveals the broad spread of sites across the populated regions of Ethiopia, and illustrates the operation of the various criteria designed to ensure spatial diversity of places and coverage of important dimensions of poverty and vulnerability. The parts of the Ethiopian map that lack PPA sites do so because they are sparsely populated or because it was not possible to conduct research there for civil security reasons.

The research was conducted by 9 research teams, each undertaking between 4 and 6 research sites determined by the geographical distribution of sites and the logistics of moving between them. Each team comprised 5 individuals, of which one was the designated team leader, and at least one member in every team had to be a woman. In addition, for capacity building purposes, each team also had a junior member in order to build available skills for undertaking this type of participatory investigation. The allocation of teams across geographical areas and number of sites is summarised in Table 2.7 below, and a full list of team members can be found at Annex B to the report.

Table 2.7 Allocation of 9 PPA Teams Location and No. of Research Sites

Research Area 4 sites 5 sites 6 sitesTigray & Afar 1 TeamAmhara 1 Team 1 TeamOromia 2 TeamsSNNP 2 TeamsAddis Ababa & B. Gumuz 1 TeamSomali, Dire Dawa, Harari 1 TeamTOTALS 3 Teams 3 Teams 3 Teams

The research was conducted between 15 November 2004 and 4 February 2005. Training for research teams took place from 15-20 November 2004, after which teams began to go into the field on 25 November 2004. The fieldwork was conducted until 16 January 2005, with variations in duration according to the number of sites to be covered, and the distances between sites faced by different teams. Each team spent a full working week (5-7 days) in each study site, and those teams covering 6 sites were encouraged to take a mid-research break at some point in their schedule. Writing up by teams of their draft community reports

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took place in the second-half of January 2005, and a Debriefing Workshop was held on 3-4 February 2005 in Addis Ababa.

In this report the findings generated by the PPA fieldwork are supplemented, where appropriate, with selected data generated by the 2004 Welfare Monitoring Survey (WMS) for the same enumeration areas as the PPA research sites. This is done by footnoting similarities and differences between the PPA and the WMS, for WMS data that was available at the time of writing (this mainly comprised responses to qualitative questions). The WMS was conducted in June and July 2004, roughly 4 months before the PPA fieldwork. The number of WMS respondents represented by these enumeration areas was 372 rural and 239 urban, giving a sample size of 611 in total.4

4 When these samples are weighted according to population proportions, they would represent 544 rural and 67 urban households in the total 611 households; however, this report only makes use of rural and urban averages taken separately.

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Chapter 3 PPA Findings for Rural Communities

3.1 The PPA Rural Research SitesThis chapter of the report sets out the findings for the rural PPA research sites. The research was conducted in 31 different places, the spatial distribution of which is illustrated in Figures 3.1 and 3.2 below. Basic data on the woredas and kebeles in which research took place is provided at Annex A, Table 1 to this report.

The rural PPA sites encompassed a diverse array of agro-ecological, cultural and religious diversity in Ethiopia. Farming systems covered the predominantly grain-based agriculture of the central highlands (teff, barley and wheat), fruit and vegetable production in many places, the coffee and enset agriculture of Oromia and SNNP regions, maize, sorghum and sweet potatoes in southern and western areas, and the mainly pastoral livelihoods in Afar and Somali regions. Livestock featured as a critical component of successful rural livelihoods in most locations, yet as we shall see livestock keeping also represents challenges for the future. Perhaps more than any other single factor, livestock disease and death were cited as primary reasons for households experiencing chronic poverty, or going into a downward spiral into poverty.

At one level, the differences between rural places scattered across Ethiopia seem very large and provoke the question as to whether any meaningful generalisations can be obtained from a research exercise like the PPA. The incredibly constrained land situation in the central and eastern highland areas contrasts, for example, with relative land abundance in some parts of SNNP and the west of the country. The huge size of cattle herds of the Afar or Somali peoples contrasts with the quite small livestock holdings of most people living in Tigray or Amhara regions. Climate and crops grown differ considerably from north to south, and from east to west, taking into account also the contrasts of the rift valley and its escarpments.

Nevertheless, when the findings set out in the 31 different PPA rural site reports are examined, these apparently big locational differences in rural Ethiopia are overshadowed by the similarities in people’s livelihood circumstances across all locations. In all places, there are more features in common than those which distinguish one place from another: everywhere there are more poor people than there are middle or well-off people, the livelihood circumstances that define relative poverty and well-being are similar, and there are considerable overlaps in the problems that people identify as making it difficult for them to construct improving livelihoods. It is due to these similarities that it is possible to treat all rural PPA sites as variations on particular themes that have wide application across the whole of rural Ethiopia. This does not prevent special circumstances that are unique to particular sites or geographical areas from being recognised, and being used to modify generalisations that are made. However, the general case, and the approach used in this report is to pool the results across all PPA sites and identify the patterns that are similar across most rural areas.

3.2 Continuity and Change in Rural Ethiopia

3.2.1 Community LivelihoodsIt is appropriate to begin this section on the rural research findings on a positive note. As a consequence of government efforts over the past decade, and more recently within the framework of the SDPRP, a lot is going on for the better in rural Ethiopia. Almost all research reports for the 31 rural PPA sites emphasise improvements that are happening in

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Figure 3.1 Rural PPA Research Sites by Woreda Name

Figure 3.2 Rural PPA Research Sites by Kebele Name

Aeda RobaAeda RobaAeda RobaAeda RobaAeda RobaAeda RobaAeda RobaAeda RobaAeda Roba

Kebenawa KuterKebenawa KuterKebenawa KuterKebenawa KuterKebenawa KuterKebenawa KuterKebenawa KuterKebenawa KuterKebenawa Kuter

Kuter 04Kuter 04Kuter 04Kuter 04Kuter 04Kuter 04Kuter 04Kuter 04Kuter 04

Muticma GorbieMuticma GorbieMuticma GorbieMuticma GorbieMuticma GorbieMuticma GorbieMuticma GorbieMuticma GorbieMuticma Gorbie

ChichuChichuChichuChichuChichuChichuChichuChichuChichu

Awera AraraAwera AraraAwera AraraAwera AraraAwera AraraAwera AraraAwera AraraAwera AraraAwera Arara

KaloKaloKaloKaloKaloKaloKaloKaloKalo

WeyiboWeyiboWeyiboWeyiboWeyiboWeyiboWeyiboWeyiboWeyibo

WeshiebaWeshiebaWeshiebaWeshiebaWeshiebaWeshiebaWeshiebaWeshiebaWeshieba

Gasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoGasorena ChanchoBabuBabuBabuBabuBabuBabuBabuBabuBabu

EanedekialeEanedekialeEanedekialeEanedekialeEanedekialeEanedekialeEanedekialeEanedekialeEanedekiale

JeleboJeleboJeleboJeleboJeleboJeleboJeleboJeleboJelebo

Legdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuLegdeamna WayuChuta SeduChuta SeduChuta SeduChuta SeduChuta SeduChuta SeduChuta SeduChuta SeduChuta Sedu

ShoberaShoberaShoberaShoberaShoberaShoberaShoberaShoberaShoberaShibetamShibetamShibetamShibetamShibetamShibetamShibetamShibetamShibetam

Mehal AmbaMehal AmbaMehal AmbaMehal AmbaMehal AmbaMehal AmbaMehal AmbaMehal AmbaMehal Amba

Buya EyesusBuya EyesusBuya EyesusBuya EyesusBuya EyesusBuya EyesusBuya EyesusBuya EyesusBuya Eyesus

K.04 ShebateK.04 ShebateK.04 ShebateK.04 ShebateK.04 ShebateK.04 ShebateK.04 ShebateK.04 ShebateK.04 Shebate

Debre AbayDebre AbayDebre AbayDebre AbayDebre AbayDebre AbayDebre AbayDebre AbayDebre Abay Debre MedhanitDebre MedhanitDebre MedhanitDebre MedhanitDebre MedhanitDebre MedhanitDebre MedhanitDebre MedhanitDebre Medhanit

Amede WehaAmede WehaAmede WehaAmede WehaAmede WehaAmede WehaAmede WehaAmede WehaAmede Weha

AradoAradoAradoAradoAradoAradoAradoAradoAradoGuled MariamGuled MariamGuled MariamGuled MariamGuled MariamGuled MariamGuled MariamGuled MariamGuled Mariam

Tach WaleTach WaleTach WaleTach WaleTach WaleTach WaleTach WaleTach WaleTach Wale

BakeloBakeloBakeloBakeloBakeloBakeloBakeloBakeloBakelo

Meru EkeleMeru EkeleMeru EkeleMeru EkeleMeru EkeleMeru EkeleMeru EkeleMeru EkeleMeru Ekele

Kaso ShekmeraKaso ShekmeraKaso ShekmeraKaso ShekmeraKaso ShekmeraKaso ShekmeraKaso ShekmeraKaso ShekmeraKaso Shekmera

BirakBirakBirakBirakBirakBirakBirakBirakBirak

GahoGahoGahoGahoGahoGahoGahoGahoGaho

Basona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona WeranaBasona Werana

EnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemayEnemay

TelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTelteleTeltele

DaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDaleDale

Boloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso SoreBoloso Sore

SoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroSoroAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngachaAngacha

WenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenagoWenago

Limu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu KosaLimu Kosa

BenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBenchBench

Lay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay GayintLay Gayint

Asegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede TsimbelaAsegede Tsimbela

DarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebuDarolebu

HabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabroHabro Kurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa CheleKurfa Chele

MetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMetaMeta

HabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabruHabru

HawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzenHawzen

AlajeAlajeAlajeAlajeAlajeAlajeAlajeAlajeAlaje

DubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDubtiDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehanaDehana

DebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaDebresinaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkeshaAnkesha

GimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbiGimbi

MetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetuMetu

CheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliyaCheliya

Sinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana DinshoSinanana Dinsho

ShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileShinileBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasiBambasi

ChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaChehaCheha

KonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonsoKonso

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rural areas. The existence of these improvements is substantiated by triangulating data between key informants, community discussion groups, and a variety of different participatory methods that bring different perspectives to bear on circumstances in rural communities.

In the area of public services and infrastructure, increased school provision is the most often emphasized of all improvements. This is also the most valued improvement as indicated by institutional ranking exercises undertaken in the PPA. All 31 PPA rural sites had primary schools either on site or within 20-30 minutes walk of the EA (Table 3.1). The grades covered by these schools varied, with 40 per cent being Grade 1-8 and 30 per cent being Grade 1-4. Schools had been improved through new provision, new classroom building on older schools, or rehabilitation of existing classrooms. Of course, not all is yet perfect in this domain (see section 3.6 below); however, observable progress is being made and is recognised as such by rural citizens.5

Table 3.8 Level of Primary School Provision in the PPA Rural Sites

Level of Provision No. of Sites % Sites

Grades 1-2 1 3.3Grades 1-4 9 30.0Grades 1-5 1 3.3Grades 1-6 5 16.7Grades 1-7 2 6.7Grades 1-8 12 40.0TOTAL: 30 100.0

One of the first tasks of the research teams on entering rural communities was to discover whether and how people’s livelihoods had been changing in that location over the preceding five or ten years. This exercise, which was conducted with a representative community discussion group, aimed in particular to discover new economic activities in villages that had not been there previously, community members’s perceptions about aspects of rural life that had improved in recent times, and their perceptions about aspects of their lives that had got worse or deteriorated in recent times.

New activities were reported in 15 of the rural sites (just under 50 per cent of the sample). The most prevalent of these was the advent of water harvesting using ponds; followed by new vegetable and fruit crops that the community had not cultivated before. There is a link between these two, although perhaps not quite as strong as policy makers would like to hear. Pond construction was popular in some places but considered a disaster in others, and not always did the ponds end up with a reservoir of water that could be used for cultivation when the rains stopped. The expansion of vegetable and fruit production is also attributed to efforts by extension agents to get farmers to diversify their crops, to new or rehabilitated small-scale irrigation (at two sites), and to market factors (changing relative prices making vegetable

5 In the 2004 WMS, 73 per cent of respondents in the rural EAs corresponding to the PPA sites stated that primary schooling had improved over the previous 12 months.

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growing more attractive). New crops mentioned included onions, tomatoes, green vegetables, potatoes, oranges, lemons (5 sites).

Other new activities mentioned less frequently across the sample sites were animal fattening, cultivation of improved seeds (wheat & oilseeds), new poultry enterprises, terracing for water retention (3 sites), compost making, and, with rather less positive connotations, firewood and charcoal sales and petty trading activities. These latter were more to do with the inadequacy of farm-based livelihoods than with its success. In general non-farm activities feature little in this sort of list, an aspect to which this report returns in due course.

Altogether around 25 different factors were cited as contributing to improvements in rural livelihoods over the past 5 or 10 years. The frequency of mention of these in terms of the number of study sites where they were brought to the attention of the researchers is shown in Table 3.2 below. The most important group of these were related to improved agricultural extension services and on-farm diversification, already mentioned above in relation to new activities in rural communities. Other agricultural factors cited with less frequency were increased fertilizer use, improved seeds, terracing and marsh drainage. Bee keeping (beehives) as a new or growing activity was mentioned in several reports.

While the most important non-agricultural factor reported as improving people’s lives was school provision, road improvements, availability of health posts and access to potable water also received quite a few mentions. Less often mentioned were better security, enhanced ability to exercise democratic rights, and conflict resolution, although since these were only mentioned in 1-3 research sites each, they could not be said to be necessarily widely or uniformly experience across rural Ethiopia.

Table 3.9 Frequency of Mention of Livelihood Improvements

No. of Research Sites Stated Improvement

14 improved agricultural extension services8-10 provision of schools, and quality of schooling

on-farm diversification (mainly vegetable & fruit) road improvements, incl. food-for-work construction of water harvesting ponds

4-7 availability of health posts new or rehabilitated small-scale irrigation access to potable water (handpump or spring) improved security

1-3 beehives, democratic rights, grinding mills, livestock fattening, non-farm activity, conflict resolution, reforestation, increased fertilizer use, improved seeds, terrace building, marsh drainage, veterinary posts, settlement (of pastoralists), food-for-work, coffee processing

Finally in this context, the presence or absence of private grinding mills in villages makes a very considerable difference to the lives of women, and the installation of such mills over the past five years is always remarked upon as a livelihood improvement when it has happened.

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This provides a useful reminder that not all “improvements” in people’s lives must be government led, and indeed, there can be private services like grinding mills where an enabling environment by local government towards investment in them can have beneficial effects without any public costs involved. There is no doubt that the benefits of private services, like grinding mills, are increased if there is competition between two or more suppliers. A single grinding mill in a community is an invitation to monopoly pricing, and can cause widespread ill-feeling if this position is abused (mentioned in several site reports). However, more than one in the same vicinity gives people choices and ensures that the price of the service provided remains reasonable in relation to the cost of its provision.

In considering the factors that were improving people’s lives, there was one that has been found to be of considerable importance in other countries that was scarcely however mentioned in the rural community discussions in Ethiopia, and that was non-farm activities. Indeed, only in two out of the 31 rural research reports are non-farm income sources cited as being the source of improvements in household livelihoods. This relative unimportance of non-farm activities can be related to attitudes to migration, low human mobility in Ethiopia’s rural areas, and the small populations living in the urban centres that are located in rural areas.

While much has been going on over the past five years, especially in the improvement of extension services, social services (education and health), water provision, and road improvements in rural areas, there are of course also trends that have opposing effects on people’s lives. Respondents in community discussions were asked under a number of different headings about things that stopped their livelihoods improving or were causing their livelihoods to deteriorate over time. Responses to these questions were triangulated by discussion with key informants both within the community and amongst kebele and woreda officials. The frequency of mention of these factors across the rural study sites is shown in Table 3.3 below.

Undoubtedly the problem that most pre-occupies rural citizens is the size of their agricultural landholdings and the decline of these over time due to rural population growth. More than half the study sites reported farm subdivision and fragmentation as the primary factor causing their livelihoods to get worse. This topic is a most important one in relation to the PPA, and is therefore examined under a separate sub-heading in Section 3.2.4 below.

Farm subdivision is one manifestation of a group of agricultural and environmental problems that are associated with rural population growth in the presence of increasingly absolute land constraints. The authors of this report do not take the Malthusian view that population growth is necessarily “bad” (a view, incidentally, taken by many woreda and kebele officials and cited in the rural research reports). Rather, rural population growth raises issues about the slow pace of rural-urban transition in Ethiopia and the consequent lack of dynamism in non-farm sub-sectors in rural areas. Population growth would not be a problem for agriculture and the environment if that population was becoming urbanised and providing a growing market for agricultural outputs. As it is, the countryside in Ethiopia is under enormous pressure, and this manifests itself in the frequency with which problems such as soil erosion, soil fertility decline, deforestation, and grazing shortages are mentioned in rural communities.

Other factors mentioned in 25 per cent or more of rural sites include crop pests and diseases, including an apparent rodent problem associated with terracing, too high fertilizer prices (a common complaint of poor small farmers throughout Sub-Saharan Africa), poor road quality

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or no road access at all (representing places that have not yet benefited from the road improvement programme), and livestock diseases. This latter problem is a serious one that is centrally implicated in people’s vulnerability and the likelihood that their lives will take a dive for the worse when unexpected shocks happen. Loss of livestock to disease is reported widely through the rural PPA reports, under several other headings apart from just this one, and it poses questions about the accessibility and quality of veterinary services that are taken up later in this report.

Table 3.10 Frequency of Mention of Factors Worsening Livelihoods

No. of Research Sites Stated Problem or Cause

17 land subdivision (incl. “landlessness”)11-14 soil erosion

grazing shortages deforestation recurrent droughts

8-10 crop pests, including rats too high fertilizer prices poor road quality or no road access livestock diseases

4-6 crop diseases incidence of malaria soil fertility decline crime and insecurity population growth inadequate supply of fertilizer food insecurity remoteness incursion by wild animals

2-3 cultural and religious constraints, unsafe water, poor justice system, marketing problems, lack of oxen, deficient veterinary services, ineffective water ponds

1 too many “contributions”, coffee berry disease, health post deficiencies, land loss from demarcation, low onion prices, spread of so-called woyane tree (Shinile)

Other considerations listed in Table 3.3 were cited less often, and their importance in the circumstances of the rural poor is often restricted to particular kinds of agro-ecological system (for example, the woyane tree, or incursions by wild animals). In two instances, a low level of mention at this stage is over-turned under other research headings where widespread negative perceptions become apparent. These are health and veterinary delivery, to which we return in the section on Institutions and Quality of Services below.

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3.2.2 Cultural and Religious FactorsNot unexpectedly, cultural and religious factors play very strong roles in rural communities throughout Ethiopia. These factors determine the number of days per week or per month it is acceptable to do certain kinds of work, the types of cooperation that occur between families in villages, the traditional social support systems that occur in rural communities, and the set of established norms and expectations regarding the different gender roles of men and women. The religious affiliation of the societies that were studied during the Ethiopia PPA is summarised in Table 3.4 below. For those sites that reported religious affiliation, 8 were wholly or predominantly Orthodox Christian (28 per cent), 7 were mainly mixtures of other Christian denominations (24 per cent), 12 were predominantly Muslim (41 per cent) and 2 had populations that were divided roughly equally between Orthodox Christian and Muslim (7 per cent).

Table 3.11 Religious Affiliation in Rural PPA Sites

Religious Affiliation(Rural PPA Sites)

No. of Cases

% of Cases

Orthodox 8 27.6Other Christian 7 24.1Muslim 12 41.450:50* 2 6.9TOTAL: 29 100.0

* 2 sites were divided roughly equally between Orthodox Christian and Muslim

Source: PPA reports for rural sites

One of the features that religion has an important bearing on is working patterns in villages. In some cases, Orthodox Christianity only permits people to undertake ploughing and other heavy agricultural work for 10 to 12 days per month. Saturdays, Sundays and Saint days that vary from one community to another are days on which it is unacceptable to do ploughing, weeding or harvesting. Sanctions may involve being excluded from Idir, being treated as an outcast, or having to pay a fine in kind to the church (e.g. a bag of grain). These are referred to as “ice” days since the belief is that working on those days will cause snow or hailstones to fall causing destruction of growing crops. In one report (Site No.3), a negotiation with the church had taken place in order for villagers to be allowed to extend their work from 7 to 10 days per month; in another report (Site No.9) a total of 164 days per year were regarded as non-work days.

Overall, six out of 20 sites (30 per cent) reported strict adherence to the orthodox prohibitions on farm work; although the number of prohibited days per month varied between 10 and 20 in different places. All these locations were in Tigray and Amhara regions. In places with mixed Orthodox and Muslim populations, adherence to these days was less strict, and sanctions less likely to be imposed. Muslims generally observe one day a week as holiday (Fridays) and a few feast days per year, and for them work on a Friday morning would not always be considered such a serious social offence. In Oromia and SNNP regions, views about holidays are more relaxed, vary according to a mixture of religious denominations, and

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rarely invoke sanctions, even in places with an Orthodox presence. Fourteen out of 20 sites (70 per cent) reported the absence of sanctions for breaking cultural norms regarding holiday working.

Box 3.1 Holidays and Farm Work Example 1

Holidays in this community have profound implications on livelihoods. This is because an individual community member spends 20 days per month without working in the fields due to holidays. The community is well aware of the negative impacts of holidays on worsening the existing poverty. Nevertheless, they do not work on holidays because they are afraid of God’s anger, and the penalty that can come in the forms of snowfall or other kinds of natural calamity.

There is penalty from the community side as well. Any member who commits to work in the field on holidays is outcast by the community. There is a practical punishment too imposed on those who disregard holidays in the community. The penalty that is set for those who work during holidays amounts to 5 minilik (1 kuna) of cereal to be paid to the church in the vicinity. The community said that it is unaffordable for them to pay this portion from their meagre output, so that they would not repeat it again.

Source: PPA Site Report No.3, Amede Weha kebele, Ambalaje woreda, Tigray Region, p.4 (edited)

Box 3.2 Holidays and Farm Work Example 2

“We do not work ploughing and harvesting on religious days. If we work on those days, snow and frost will occur and our harvest will be adversely affected. Recently, some community members started to do farming on those days, and the weather situation of our environment was changed and our lives started to deteriorate.”

Source: participant in a mixed community meeting, PPA Site Report No.10, Bakelo kebele, Basona Werana woreda, Amhara Region

3.2.3 Land Tenure and AccessLand plays such a critical role in the future ability of agriculture to deliver growth and poverty reduction in Ethiopia that land access issues raised in the PPA site reports merit bringing together all in one place. In the Ethiopian constitution, ownership of land is vested in the state, and users of the land (as far as farm families are concerned) are regarded as rent-free tenants on state land. Nevertheless, the durable character of this tenancy is fully recognised, and the tenant “owners” of land are permitted to pass on their land at inheritance; moreover in recent years certification of such ownership has been going on so that family rights in land are properly registered at the level of the woreda administration. Ownership equality between the sexes is also enshrined in the land legislation, such that on divorce women are entitled to half of the land certified as belonging to the family.

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It is something of an article of faith in government and state circles in Ethiopia that all those who wish to access land are able to do so.6 In Tigray and Amhara regions, land redistributions occurred in EC 1983 (1990/91) and EC 1989 (1997/98), and it would appear from the PPA reports that those who benefited were generally allocated one timad of land for a family (0.5 ha) or 0.5 timad (0.25 ha) for an individual. Variations in these allocations occurred, depending on the availability of land for redistribution, and how far it was possible or advisable to break up holdings of some people in order to give access to others. These farm sizes only apply, of course, to reallocated land. An existing pattern of farm sizes in the range of 0.5 to 2 ha was for the most part left intact, and it was only those owners with larger holdings whose land was subdivided for redistribution.

The pressures on access to land do not, of course, stand still. Ethiopia has a rapidly rising population, and the transition from rural to urban-based livelihoods is occurring relatively slowly. This means that a large proportion of each successive generation continues to require access to land in order to construct agricultural livelihoods. In Tigray and Amhara, those generations that have become adults since the EC1983 redistribution are technically “landless”, at least until they are able to acquire their parents holding at inheritance, or unless they marry someone who fortuitously already has entitlement to land. In practice what occurs widely is land sharing, in which young married couples or unmarried individuals are allocated a part of their parents land to farm, or share the tasks and produce of the household farm as a single unit.7

As this process occurs, the stresses on the agrarian structure continue to grow. Land is effectively subdivided in order to allow later generations the ability to engage in agriculture, but holdings also become spatially fragmented due to the cross-relationships of access that occur on marriage and death. Evidence from the PPA suggests that land subdivision and fragmentation are rife throughout rural Ethiopia, but especially in the densely settled highland regions. The response of government to this situation has been to try to take the pressure off some locations by relocating families to other places (resettlement). However, the ultimate futility of this as a long term solution to the land problem in Ethiopia must at some stage be recognised. The numbers that can be resettled (a few hundred families from here and there) relative to the scale of the problem is minuscule. Moreover, the PPA reports suggest that quite a large proportion of resettled families end up back where they started within a year or two of the resettlement.

The rural PPA research reports reveal many interesting aspects of the current land situation and its future trajectory. The average land holding across 17 sites that reported a community “average” was 0.75 ha (Table 3.5). This comprises mean farm sizes in the range of 0.25 to 0.5 ha (9 sites) and a scattering of places with larger mean land holdings in the range of 1-2 ha (8 sites). Data from the well-being ranking provided evidence that “better-off” farmers had a mean farm size of 1.8 ha; middle farmers 0.8 ha; and “worse-off” or poor households 0.25 ha; however, half of the 20 sites that reported data for the latter provided farm size figures in the range of zero to 0.1 ha for poor households. The proportions in each of these well-being

6 The way this is stated in the SDPRP is as follows: “The land ownership policy stipulates that every farmer who wants to make a livelihood from farming is entitled to have a plot free of charge.” (Ethiopia, MoFED, 2002b: p.52)

7 The 2004 WMS data for the PPA rural EAs recorded 9.3 per cent of households as saying that their land area had declined in the previous 4 years, while 83.3 per cent had stayed the same, and 5.2 per cent had increased. These were qualitative replies, not linked to land area evidence.

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categories across all sites was 11 per cent “better-off”, 33 per cent middle, and 56 per cent “poor” or “very poor” (see the section on well-being ranking below). Of course, the non-ownership of land ascribed to the poor must be interpreted in the light of the earlier discussion: non-ownership does not necessarily mean “no access” due to sharing by parents of their land with their adult children.

Table 3.12 Farm Size Data in the PPA Rural Sites

Data Provided No. of Cases (PPA sites)

Mean Farm Size (ha)

Average land-holding 17 0.75Well-being ranking:

- better off 20 1.79- middle 20 0.82- poor or v. poor 20 0.25

Source: PPA Reports for Rural Research Sites

The EC 1983 and 1989 land redistributions occurred predominantly in Tigray and Amhara regions. The recollection of participants in Oromia and SNNP regions was that the last land distribution done in their communities occurred in EC1967 at the time of the Derg regime. PPA evidence suggests that land ownership sizes are more diverse in Oromia and SNNP than in Tigray and Amhara. Nevertheless, the same emerging circumstances prevail. Most communities have reached absolute constraints on available land so that accommodating future generations will lead to diminishing farm size. Only one PPA rural site (Bambasi woreda in Benishangul Gumuz) reported no shortage of available land to allocate. Some sites had been allocated incoming settlers and this was deeply resented by the residents when they felt they did not have any surplus land of their own.

Lack of quality land for agriculture manifests itself in other ways, too, in the PPA reports. As noted earlier, “grazing shortage” was the third most cited reason for worsening livelihood conditions across the study sites. At the same time, soil erosion, soil fertility and deforestation were all amongst the top six reasons for difficult or worsening livelihoods. The pressure on land in rural Ethiopia is relentless, and will not go away, and cannot be solved by developments within agriculture alone (see Box 3.3 below). Potential achievements in raising the productivity of land through new varieties, new crops, better fertilizer use, and water harvesting schemes risk being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the continuing demands being made on what for most people at the household level experience as a continuously shrinking land resource.

While women in Tigray and Amhara enjoy equal land rights, and this was widely recognised and positively looked on in the PPA sites in those regions, the same does not apply in other parts of rural Ethiopia. The norm elsewhere is for women to gain rights over land solely in the context of marriage, and for those rights to disappear if a marriage ends for whatever reason: death of husband, separation, divorce. It seems that in many places cultural norms prevail over legislative rules in this respect. The PPA reports reveal two main variants of the weak status of women with respect to land in Oromia and SNNP regions.

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Box 3.3 Generational Problems in Land Ownership

Elder households occupy land since no distributions have been made for many years. Newly emerging households cannot get land for farming. Access to land is possible through inheritance, gifts from parents to use the land, or by sharecropping. Women can inherit land from their parents or from their husband. Such rights are very recent provisions. Land fragmentation is on the increase. At the time of the last distribution [EC1967] the biggest farm size was 4 ha and the smallest 2 ha. Land is still owned by older households and ownership rights are not transferred. Since the population is increasing from year to year and land remains the same, crop production per unit area is declining and agricultural activity without a sound extension system may not support the population in the future.

Source: PPA Site Report No.20, Kuter 04 kebele, Habro woreda, West Harerghe, Oromia Region (p.20, edited)

Perhaps the least favourable custom for women is the one by which “ownership” of the wife passes from the deceased husband to his brother, and if this arrangement is refused the woman loses all rights to her late husband’s land. There were 5 PPA rural sites (16 per cent) where this custom prevailed. The other prevalent custom is for the woman to have access rights to the land of her deceased husband only if she has borne him a son. Then two situations can arise: in the first, she has a son, and she can remain temporary custodian of the land until the son grows up; in the second, she does not have a son and must leave the land to her husband’s relatives and return to her parents homestead. There were 13 PPA rural sites (42 per cent) where these customary rules applied (Table 3.6).

Table 3.13 Summary of Findings on Women’s Land Rights

Land Rights of Womenin Rural Ethiopia

No. of Cases(PPA sites) % of Cases

Legal equality accepted 11 35.5Unequal rights the norm: 18 58.1

- brother takes over 5 16.1- temporary, only with son 13 42.0

Source: PPA Reports for Rural Research Sites

3.2.4 Gender Dimensions of Rural LivelihoodsLand rights are of course just one aspect of gender differences in rural Ethiopia that potentially have significance for poverty reduction. While gender was an integral part of all components of the PPA, and many of the community discussions were held with mixed gender groups, it is nevertheless worth drawing attention to particular aspects of the social relations between men and women that are not brought out very clearly under other headings.

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Women play a highly subordinated role in Ethiopian rural society and rigid divisions of tasks between men and women tend to be observed. In this women are solely responsible for domestic chores, which a man would never be expected to do (cooking, cleaning, housework, childcare etc.); while men are solely responsible for certain agricultural tasks (ploughing, digging, construction, fencing, beekeeping). According to the PPA research, in 16 out of 21 sites that commented on this (75 per cent), men have absolute control on household decisions and money management. In the remaining 25 per cent of cases, these are said to be “divided”, however, it is apparent from the discussions that the norm is for men to dominate in these spheres.

There are certain areas where women have more decision making capability. There are apparently few restrictions with respect to the types of livestock women can keep, and sales of eggs, hens, milk, butter or cheese are typically stated to be within the female domain. However, some reports stated that women were unlikely to own cattle (oxen or cows), and cattle sales are typically in the male domain.

A rise in the number of female headed households (FHHHs) is widely reported in the PPA rural sites. This occurs due to husband death, divorce, or polygamy in those parts of the country where taking multiple wives is the cultural norm. Female household heads clearly have more autonomy in decision making than married women, although the activities in which they can become engaged remain circumscribed by culture and custom. In particular, women are typically prohibited from ploughing land, and in some places they are not permitted to go to market places. A major reason for FHHHs having to sharecrop their land out is the social prohibition on ploughing and other “male” farm activities. But this sharecropping out is a serious disadvantage for the women concerned (they only obtain 50 per cent of farm output, and can be easily cheated), and is a contributory factor in pushing them into poverty.

In some ways, restrictions on what women can and cannot do in rural Ethiopia is part of the composite picture of lack of adaptability and responsiveness that makes rapid economic change so difficult to spark into life in Ethiopia. There are some signs in the rural PPA reports that inhibitions may be very gradually loosening, and a more tolerant view taken of lifestyles that do not correspond to the “old ways”. However, this is tending to occur due to extreme duress, rather than as a positive response to new opportunities. In other words, if a family is going to starve unless the woman household head obtains wage work, then her engagement in wage work may be reluctantly permitted. Nevertheless, the norm is to prevent rather than to encourage, and to ostracise rather than accept social diversity.

3.3 Well-Being Ranking and Livelihood Trajectories in Rural EthiopiaWell-being ranking was undertaken in all the rural sites of the Ethiopia PPA. The method used was to select a random sample of 100 households from the household list of the Enumeration Area (EA) where research was taking place. Then a community group of key informants were asked to suggest criteria defining different levels of well-being in the community. Having defined a number of well-being groups (typically between 3 and 5 different groups), the selected households were then assigned to one or other group in a process of consultation with the key informants. In addition, the key informants were asked to identify whether households had been moving downward, upwards or staying the same with respect to the well-being group to which they were allocated. This data was noted and used to collect personal histories of families that had moved upwards or downwards.

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Well-being ranking serves several useful purposes in the context of a PPA, and these may be summarised as follows:

it provides information on how communities themselves view relative livelihood success or failure, and can therefore help with ranking policy priorities in support of the rural poor;

it provides a rough indicator of relative equality or inequality in rural areas, thus also helping policy to distinguish those who do not need help from those who do;

it permits upward and downward trends in people’s well-being to be identified, including the causal factors that result in virtuous spirals out of poverty, or downward spirals into chronic poverty

Across the 31 rural study sites of the Ethiopia PPA, a total of 28 different criteria were used by key informants to define relative poverty and wealth (or ill-being and well-being). However, for any particular study site, 5-7 criteria predominated, so many of the markers for relative well-being were unique to just one or two places and were not relevant widely across rural areas. Undoubtedly, the most popular of all criteria was livestock holdings, followed closely by degree of food security defined as the number of months that a family was able to feed itself without recourse to begging, borrowing, food aid, food-for-work and so on. Livestock ownership itself breaks down into 4-5 sub-categories such as cows and calves; oxen for ploughing; goats and sheep; donkeys or mules or horses; chickens; and camels. Also high in the list of criteria were land area available for farming, land renting (sharecropping) behaviour, and whether labour is hired-in or hired-out by the household.

The number of well-being groups identified by participants varied between 3 and 5. In the case of 3 groups, these would be stated as “better-off”, “middle” and “worse-off”. In some study sites the latter group was subdivided between the “poor” and the “very poor”. In others the better-off group was also subdivided between the “rich” and the “better-off”. In the analysis that follows, all well-being rankings were reorganised into just three groups for comparative purposes. However, for certain insights, it is useful to return to the more finely differentiated groups; for example, the very poor are typically defined as those with no access to land at all (genuinely “landless”), who are dependent entirely on work on other farms for survival, and we return to some of these insights later in this section.

Table 3.7. summarises the principal findings of the well-being ranking across all study sites. The data in this table is derived from more detailed information provided in Annex B to this report. Levels of well-being indicators are typically supplied as ranges by key informants; for example, the better-off own 3-5 cows, or the poor own 0-0.5 ha of land. In order to calculate the data given in Table 3.7, the mid-point of these ranges is taken as a single figure for that indicator, so that 3-5 cows, for example, enters the calculation as 4 cows. It was also necessary to exclude data “outliers” that are not representative of the majority Ethiopian rural economy; for example, the study site in Shinile woreda had 400 cattle as the typical holding of a well-off family, and while being pertinent to Afar livelihoods this is not helpful for trying to summarise patterns that occur in most other rural areas of Ethiopia.

Overall, across all study sites, only 11 per cent of sample households were classified as “better off” or rich; 33 per cent were classified as “middle”; and 56 per cent were classified as “worse off”, poor or very poor. The key characteristics of being “better-off” in rural Ethiopia are seen as ownership of moderate levels of livestock in most places (2-3 cattle, 6

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sheep or goats etc.); being food secure for 12 months; possessing land in the range 1.0 to 2.5 ha; and hiring-in rather than hiring-out labour. Of course, in a few places cattle holding as a well-being indicator was much higher (30 cattle or more, up to 400). In the Amhara and Tigray regions, there were a few instances where hiring out, rather than the more common hiring-in, labour was a characteristic of a well-off household. Also in the same regions, better-off households often sharecrop land belonging to poor households (esp. female headed households) that are unable to cultivate land due to social prohibitions or lack of complementary assets (oxen, ploughs, labour etc.).8 This is an unusual feature, not often observed in sharecrop tenancy in other countries, where tenants are most often the poor rural households tilling the land of large rich landowners.

Table 3.14 Summary Data on Well-Being Ranking, All Rural Sites

Well-Being Criteria

Group 1 Group 2 Group 3“better-off” “middle” “worse-off”

307 HH 916 HH 1574 HH(11%) (33%) (56%)

Livestock No. cattle (excl. oxen) oxen sheep & goats donkeys, mules, horses

2.52.66.01.8

1.41.03.30.7

0.2 (75%=0)0.1 (90%=0)1.40.0

Food Security months that own food

supplies last 11

(most 12)7 3

(20%=0)Land

area in hectares owned (excl. sharecrop-in)

1.8 0.8 0.2(20%=0)

Labour hire-in labour some hire-in or hire-out hire-out labour

88%- -- -

- -53%47%

- -- -

100%No. of Observations

no. of sites in averages 17-21 15-25 15-27

Note: per cent figures in brackets refer to proportion of cases for which the criterion had the value zero

Source: 31 rural PPA site reports

The middle category of households have less of all these assets, and, critically, on average are interpreted as only managing to achieve food security from own production for 7 months or so. The position with “worse-off” or poor households is rather more complicated, especially since the very poor have been brought into this category. Non-ownership of cattle, oxen and pack animals predominates for members of this group, which if they have livestock at all are 8 Twenty per cent of rural sites listed sharecropping-in as an important key criterion for

being “better off”; similarly, 20 per cent of sites listed sharecropping-out as a key criterion for being poor or very poor.

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likely to own just a few goats and chickens. The rough average of food security for this group comes out at 3 months, although many of the site reports stated zero against this indicator. This links closely to land, which is also often stated as zero for this group. Finally, this group is strongly characterised by the hiring out of family labour to others in the community or further afield.

Interpreting the seriousness of landlessness and food insecurity for the “worse-off” group of households is a difficult matter (see discussion in Section 3.2.3 above on the land question). People may be stated as landless because they have no technical ownership of land, but nevertheless they may share the land of their parents or other relatives. Likewise, people may have zero food security in the sense that they produce none of their own food output, yet through other means they are likely to have at least some entitlement to food (from wages, selling handicrafts, petty trading etc.). These points are not made in order to downplay the plight of the rural poor – in many of the case-study sites, substantial food aid or food-for-work operations were ongoing at the time of the research – however, both “landlessness” and “failure to produce own food” are conditional indicators of food insecurity that require a broader understanding of the options, or the lack of them, open to poor rural people before firm conclusions can be reached.

In some ways, the proportions between the three well-being groups across all rural study sites are of considerable interest in themselves. The classification of 56 per cent of sample respondents as poor or very poor according to qualitative criteria is a significant finding and is quite robust (standard deviation across sites =14 per cent). It compares with the 1999/2000 HICES and WMS survey results that placed 45 per cent of the Ethiopian rural population into the poor category, utilising the quantitative criterion of consumption per capita (Ethiopia, MoFED, 2002a). These two figures are not necessarily incompatible with each other. The assignment of households between groups in the PPA is according to multiple criteria that vary between sites; while consumption poverty follows a quantitative criterion applied uniformly in the context of nationally representative household surveys.

Well-being data can also supply indicative information on rural inequality, primarily through the ranges of ownership levels of different kinds of asset that are revealed by comparisons across groups and across sites. In general, rural Ethiopia presents itself as relatively equal, manifested by the narrow ranges in farm size and livestock ownership for most study sites.9

When 4 ha is considered a “generous” farm size and 6 oxen or 2 donkeys makes you a rich person, then inequality is hardly the most pressing social problem the society confronts. Indeed, it could easily be said of some parts of rural Ethiopia that “all people are poor and vulnerable”, since scarcely anyone enjoys a level and pattern of assets that would secure their livelihood in the face of unforeseen shocks or disasters. There are, of course, exceptions, manifested especially with respect to unequal livestock ownership in some places, but in the spread of experience represented by the PPA rural sites, these are very much the exception rather than the rule.

A well-being criterion notable for its insignificance in the rural sites of the Ethiopia PPA is that of access to non-farm earnings, either through ownership of non-farm business activities, or through external wages or salaries. Non-farm activities are only noted as a well-being criterion in 3 study sites, and in each of these cases it is a subsidiary or “second-order”

9 This accords with inequality data obtained from quantitative surveys. The gini coefficient for rural Ethiopia was estimated at 0.26 from the 1999/00 household surveys, which is a low level of rural inequality in international comparative terms.

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criterion rather than one of the main ones emphasized by respondents. When it does feature, non-farm activity tends to comprise petty trading, grain milling, or retail sales (village kiosks etc.). It rarely comprises substantive activities external to the community and farm (such as a household member who drives a truck, has a motorcycle taxi, works for local or national government, bicycle repair, tyre replacement service etc.). In most of the countries to the south of Ethiopia (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania), engagement in non-farm activity would be one of the most important criteria of well-being in a rural community, and, indeed, in household sample surveys it turns out to be a good predictor of overall household per capita income (Ellis & Freeman, 2004). We return later to the policy implications of the relative lack of non-farm activities in rural areas of Ethiopia.

It has already been mentioned that participants in well-being ranking exercises were asked to identify households that had moved upwards or downwards across different well-being groups during the preceding five years. In addition, respondents were asked the reasons for these upward and downward movements, and later on the research teams followed up a sub-sample of households that had moved upwards or downwards in order to obtain detailed personal histories of how these movements had come about. Movements of this kind are called “livelihood trajectories”, and understanding how they occur can be helpful for refining policy priorities in support of positive, upward, trajectories, as well as seeking to avoid creating or reinforcing negative, downward trajectories.

Across all the case-study rural sites, for the households that had been selected for well-being ranking, 12 per cent of households were identified as improving their position, while 21 per cent were identified as going down, and for 67 per cent no significant change had occurred in their circumstances in recent years.10 The relevant data is summarised in Table 3.8. Altogether, for 2,500 households for which this data was provided, 310 household were moving up, 522 households were moving down and 1,668 households experienced no change. There are a lot of variations in these movements for individuals sites and different

Table 3.15 Summary Data on Movements Between Well-Being Groups

Direction of Movement No. of HHs % of HHs

Upwards 310 12.4Downwards 522 20.9Stayed the Same 1,667 66.7TOTAL HHs 2,499 100.0

Source: 31 rural PPA research reports

locations. For example, the research site in Dubti woreda, Afar region, returned 95 per cent downward movements all due to cattle deaths occurring in the drought of 2002/3 (EC 1995). In Tigray and Amhara regions research teams generally identified more movements (both upwards and downwards) than was the case in Oromia and SNNP regions, perhaps reflecting 10 These figures differ from equivalent qualitative responses recorded in the 2004 WMS for the

same rural EAs as the PPA; however, the WMS asked respondents how their living standards had changed over the past 12 months, while the PPA had a longer time frame of the past 5 years. In the WMS, 34.4 per cent of respondents said their overall living standards had declined, while 31.8 per cent stated they had stayed the same, and 33.8 per cent stated they had improved.

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the more precarious balance of agricultural outcomes in the highland regions from one year to another.

Altogether roughly 30 distinct reasons were put forward by key informants or individual respondents as to why they had been able to move upwards from their previous well-being position (Table 3.9). Some of these are, of course, highly individual, and only occur once or twice in the entire sample of people and sites: for example, success at finding gold, or an unusually good sale of the chat harvest. The most prevalent of all reasons was stated as identifying an opportunity to rent-in land (sharecrop-in) from other families. This has the benefit to the sharecropper of increasing the land area at his disposal, permitting more effective deployment of labour and oxen, and resulting in higher crop output and potential sales. However, this opportunity for “doing better” usually occurs because someone else is in difficulty and finds themselves unable to cultivate their land due to lack of oxen, implements and labour. Interestingly, the opposite action (sharecropping-out) was one of the most common reasons stated for downward livelihood trajectories, and is closely associated with an apparent rise in female headed households in rural Ethiopia (on which more in due course).

Table 3.16 Frequency of Reasons for Upward Movements

No. of Research Sites

Reasons for Upward Movements(grouped when similar to each other)

12 rent-in land (sharecrop-in)8 non-farm business income

new or rehabilitated small-farm irrigation7 on-farm diversification

beehives rising farm yields and output (good harvests)

6 successful livestock rearing (few losses to disease etc.) non-farm salary income petty grain or other crop trading increased fertilizer use

5 livestock purchases fruit and vegetable production (links to irrigation above) gaining land from inheritance

4 sufficient HH productive members cash saving & investment

1-3 hardwork, gifts from parents (land, livestock), hire-out labour, less children, good coffee sales, diversification of income sources, participation in debo, gold mining, providing pack animals, water harvesting, chat sales

Other reasons for upward movements are more interesting from a policy point of view. Engagement in non-farm activities were cited in a number of cases, comprising either non-farm business activities (e.g. trading or grinding mills or retail activities) or non-farm salaries (typically kebele or woreda officials) or unspecified “diversification of income sources”. This finding does not contradict observations made elsewhere in this report that Ethiopia exhibits relatively few non-farm opportunities compared to other low income countries with similar or somewhat higher per capita incomes. It is recalled (Table 3.8 above) that upward movements

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were a small minority of total cases across the case-study sites, and within this minority, non-farm activities of various kinds only amount to about 16 instances across 2500 households.

Encouraging in relation to policy initiatives of the past five years are the causes of upward movements associated with on-farm diversification. The reports for the different rural sites contain quite a few instances of farmers changing cropping patterns with the encouragement of extension agents, enabling them to take advantage of better market prices for new crops. This especially applies to diversified fruit and vegetable production, and is also associated with places that have benefited from new or rehabilitated small-scale irrigation schemes. The promotion of beehives as a source of income generation is also mentioned in a number of cases. Increased fertilizer use has a similar number of mentions.

Other reasons given for upward movements are more accidental and specific to individual family circumstances (see Box 3.4 for an example). They include hard work, gifts from parents (land or livestock), success at livestock rearing, land acquisition through inheritance, receipt of remittances or other transfers, having the right number of active and productive household members, small household size, managing to build up savings, and a host of others mentioned just once or twice across the rural research sites.

Box 3.4 Example of an Upward Movement, Male Key Informant

This male informant is 38 and is married with 6 children. He was a soldier in the previous regime. He received 2 kadas of land as a returnee soldier, and his holding increased to 4 kadas as a result of the land redistribution in EC 1983. In order to increase production he also leased-in additional land for share cropping. He is now able to cover his family’s annual food requirements. His livestock holding increased because he bought 2 horses, 3 cows, 3 sheep and 2 goats. Parallel to this, he is engaged in petty trade such as grain retail and commodities (soap, coffee and sugar), as well as vegetable production He was able to build a new house made of iron sheet, and he bought grain mill for 14,250 birr from which he earn an average of 20 birr per day. He believes that land is life and should not be sold for money. The focus group participants identified him as someone who had moved from the rich to the very rich well-being category.

Source: PPA Site Report No.14, Buya Eyesus kebele, Ankesha woreda, Agew Awi zone, Amhara Region, p.28 (edited)

Again, for downward movements in people’s livelihood fortunes, about 30 different reasons were stated across the 31 different rural research sites, although about half of these are minority reasons that are only mentioned in one or two places, and these include pests or diseases of individual crops (enset, coffee), price falls for crops (coffee, chat), wild animals, land evictions (due to demarcation for forest), and various others (Table 3.10). By far the most important reasons for downward trajectories in the study sites were death of the household head, livestock diseases and death, illness and medical expenses, large family size, and forced livestock sales (either for ceremonies or to pay for funerals and illnesses). With

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the exception of “large family size”, these reasons involve depletion of the asset status of the household, primarily in labour and livestock.

Other reasons frequently given for downward movements include old age, deficit in productive household members (lack of labour), land sharing (by parents with children), declining farm size (which includes both land sharing and subdivision at inheritance), sharecrop-out, livestock dowry, declining soil fertility and “fertilizer debt” (inability to repay fertilizer loans).

The cumulative and sequential character of downward movements emerges clearly from many of the personal histories and descriptions by researchers provided in the rural sites reports. An initial single disturbance has cumulative impacts. For example, a harvest failure due to pest or disease or drought causes assets (usually livestock) to be sold in order to maintain household consumption; loss of these assets then gives the household less room for manoeuvre if another crisis occurs such as illness or death in the family; necessitating further asset sales to pay for medical costs, or funerals. Similarly, illness or death reduces labour input into the farm, causing lower harvests, and again necessitating asset sales to compensate

Table 3.17 Frequency of Reasons for Downward Movements

No. of Research Sites

Reasons for Downward Movements(grouped when similar to each other)

16 livestock disease and death death of household head or other important member

15 illness and medical expenses enforced livestock disposals (sales, ceremonies, dowry) sharing land with children or relatives (incl. “declining

farm size”)14 large family size (many dependents)10 old age

9 insufficient productive HH members drought and crop failure

7 divorce6 share-crop out4 declining soil fertility

fertilizer loan repayments (“fertilizer debt”) school costs disability

1-2 lack of oxen, coffee disease, eviction, wild animals, alcohol consumption, grazing shortage, crop price falls, specific crop pests, funeral expenses, fertilizer prices, rats in terraces

for food security shortfalls. Livestock, labour and land play deeply interlocking roles in viable livelihood strategies, and misfortune in one of them causes spiralling downward effects in others (see Boxes 3.5 and 3.6 below for illustrations of these cumulative effects).

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Box 3.5 Downward Livelihood Sequences in Babu Village

Babu is a rural community where people are prone to various vulnerability factors. Coffee plantations tend to yield well in alternate years, rather than every year. Food grain production requires more labour than coffee, and is dependent on access to land, oxen and fertilizers, all of which represent difficulties for particular families.

The personal histories of downward moving households in Babu show that an initial loss of one asset or another causes a cumulative declining spiral in the fortunes of families. The main initial causes of downward movements are identified as loss of cattle due to disease and loss of human capital due to old age, illness or death. In addition, the ability of families to thrive can be upset by destruction of growing crops by wildlife, fertilizer debt, and a fall in the coffee price. Once a downward slide begins to occur, matters will often get worse due to the sale of further assets in order to secure food following the initial shock or unexpected change.

Source: PPA Site Report No.18, Babu kebele, Limu Kosa woreda, Jimma zone, Oromia Region, pp.35-7 (edited)

Box 3.6 Example of a Downward Movement, Female Key Informant

The key informant was born in Zagra, a nearby kebele to Buya Eyesus. She moved to Afasha gott due to marriage. She has 3 sons and a daughter. Her husband died in 1995 and she became the head of the household. Their landholding was 10 kadas, but was decreased to 4 kadas at the time of the last land redistribution. She also had 2 oxen, 3 cows and 2 sheep, but the cattle died due to animal disease. The sheep were sold for kurban, a religious ceremony for her late husband. Production fell after the death of her husband, and she stopped producing vegetables which caused her cash income to decline. She leased out the land for share cropping to oxen owners. Life began to get very difficult for the household. Food is available from January to June, but then decreases, reaching a critical shortage in July and August. In order to help, her daughter went to Burie to work as a maid and was employed for 15 birr/month. Similarly, one of her sons left for Shendi and was employed as a herder for 70 birr/8months. Lastly she said ‘…selling land and moving to another area is unthinkable…’

Source: PPA Site Report No.14, Buya Eyesus kebele, Ankesha woreda, Agew Awi zone, Amhara Region, p.30 (edited)

Downward trajectories are to some extent, but by no means always, associated with particular vulnerable groups. Old age causes downward movements in livelihood status. This occurs due to illness and medical costs, inability to continue heavy agricultural tasks, reduction in land size due to land sharing, loss of a partner (husband or wife), and so on. Divorce, separation and husband death create female headed households that are prone to downward

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spirals in their fortunes, due to lack of access to land, social prohibitions on acceptable female tasks, lack of mobility, sharecropping-out their land, and other reasons.

The role that livestock disease and death plays in increasing vulnerability represents a critical policy issue that arises from the well-being ranking and livelihood trajectories. The poorest and most vulnerable groups in rural society are defined to a considerable degree by their lack of livestock, in most places. Families that have otherwise been managing reasonably well become susceptible to downward trajectories or livelihood collapse when they lose their livestock to animal diseases or to death due to grazing failures in a drought year. As is discussed later in this report, veterinary services to farmers appear to be lagging behind other services (extension, education, health) in coverage and improvements over the past five or ten years.

3.4 Vulnerable GroupsThe downward movements in people’s livelihood fortunes described in the previous section, together with knowledge about the types of family that have remained for a long time in the “worse-off” well-being category, leads to the identification of groups in rural society that are particularly vulnerable. The term vulnerable is used here mainly, but not only, in its conventional meaning of being “highly prone to food failure”; however, that is not the only vulnerability that people confront. Loss of social status, social exclusion, and violence are also things that the poor or those on a downward trajectory can experience, and they are vulnerable to those things, too, as well as inability to secure enough food across the calendar year.

The PPA research teams were asked to each focus on a particular vulnerable group at each rural research site, and to interview members of that group in order to find out about their lives and coping strategies. The different vulnerable groups identified across the 31 rural research sites were the landless, pastoralists, the elderly, the disabled, female headed households, children in poor families, and the chronically ill. The number of case-studies for each of these groups chosen for detailed work varied across the research sites as shown in Table 3.11 below. Female headed households, children, the landless and the elderly were the most prevalent vulnerable groups identified and followed up in the field research.

One thing that is immediately evident from reading the descriptions of these vulnerable groups is that the causes and character of vulnerability are quite similar, and closely related across all of them. For example, female headed households are vulnerable because they have little or no land, following divorce or the death of their husbands, and since they also lack oxen and labour, what little land they have tends to be sharecropped-out, so that they only obtain part of the output from the land (typically 50 per cent). Quite a few reports made reference to “cheating” by sharecrop tenants – since the tenant has more accurate information than the owner of the land about the amount of crop that has been harvested, it is relatively easy for the tenant to misreport the size of the total harvest, and give the owner of the land less output than is their due. A case-study of a female headed household is provided in Box 3.7 below.

Table 3.18 Distribution of Vulnerable Groups Across Rural Study Sites

Vulnerable No of

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Group CasesLandless 7Pastoralists 2Elderly 4Disabled 2Women (FHHHs) 8Children 8Chronic Illness 1TOTAL: 32

Social prohibitions also limit the options open for female headed households. Since they are not permitted to carry out certain agricultural tasks (see the sub-section on Gender above), this also forces them into the sharecropping arrangements. Moreover, inhibitions on their mobility mean that few non-farm activities are open to them. The coping strategies of women household heads can comprise any or all of the following actions:

o collecting and selling firewood (if available)o collecting and selling crop residues or cow dungo mowing green grass to sell in the nearest market centreo selling areke or telao undertaking casual labour for otherso offering children for casual labouro begging for food at threshing fieldso borrowing from relatives or neighbours

Box 3.7 Vulnerable Female Headed Household

The key informant is a 40-year old female household head. She lives in Shebet EA site. She has three daughters and one son. When she was with her husband she was seriously ill and the family spent some amount of money for her medical treatments. She divorced from her husband 5 years ago and started living with her daughters. When she got divorced, she received 0.25 hectare of farmland (one gemed) and a few livestock. Immediately she leased out her land for sharecropping. Since the income she got from sharecropping was not enough to feed the household, one of her daughters started working outside the farm and sending occasional remittances. Now the major sources of income for the household are crops produced through sharecropping, remittances from her daughter and food aid and food-for-work. Normally, the family faces severe food shortages in Sept-Oct each year and relies on food aid, or through taking credit from their neighbors.

Source: PPA Site Report No.13, Shebet kebele, Lay Gayint woreda, South Gonder, Amhara Region, p.48 (edited)

The elderly, too, experience many of the same difficulties as women heading their own households. Again they are likely to be short of land, due to sharing out their land with their children, or being too weak or infirm to cultivate the land, so that they sharecrop out with the disadvantages already noted. The options open to the elderly are in some ways even more

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limited than those of female headed households since they lack the strength to engage in the few non-farm activities that might be open to them. No doubt whenever they are able to do so, families look after their elders as well as they can, however, when children have moved away, or families have broken up due to divorce or separation or illness, the elderly can be very vulnerable indeed.

While being a female in charge of a household is often associated with little or no access to land, this is not the only reason that causes landlessness. For many younger rural Ethiopians, landlessness arises simply because there is no longer any land that could be redistributed in the community, and where family ties have been complicated by events like second marriage, polygamy, divorce, or premature death of the household head, there is no guarantee that particular children will gain access to a share of the land that is “in the family”. Two case-studies provided in Box 3.8 below illustrate the complexity and sequential causality of landlessness in rural Ethiopia.

Box 3.8 Landlessness and Vulnerability

“I have two children from my husband. Now we are divorced mainly because I do not have land. He married another woman. Currently I am living in my mother’s house with my two children. In our community, it is difficult for landless women to marry. I wish the government could provide me with land; otherwise I suggest that they give us access to credit so that we can do micro-enterprise such as selling commodities or rearing sheep for our survival.”

Landless woman in Tach Wale kebele, Debresina woreda

“I married my wife three years ago. We have one child. Now we are separated because we do not have any land. She is living with her parents. I am living with my uncle. I hate my parents because they are not willing to give me piece of land as other parents do. I usually move to Dupti to sell my labor for wage work. Whenever I come to Tach Wale, I visit my beloved child and I give her some money. I only stay here for a maximum of three months since I then run out of money. I wish the government could give me a piece of land at least to construct a house, in which I can stay for six months with my child and wife, since the money I get from selling my labour could last six months if I could stay with my own family. Otherwise, I am willing to resettle wherever the government could resettle me.’

28-year old landless man in Tach Wale, Debresina woreda

Source: PPA Site Report No.9, Tach Wale kebele, Debresina woreda, South Wollo, Amhara Region, p.74 (edited)

Male landless have different options from female headed households or the elderly from the viewpoint of coping strategies. While certainly some of the same activities will be undertaken across all vulnerable groups, the able-bodied male landless are also able to undertake heavy agricultural work on other farmers, to travel to towns to look for wage work, and, if they are

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fortunate, to sharecrop-in land from which they can construct a viable livelihood for their own families.

Disability and chronic illness result in some of the same sequences and effects as being old or being a woman in charge of a household. Most disabled people rent out their land, since they are unable to cultivate themselves, although how much they are able or not able to do depends on the nature of their disability and how severe it is. The case study provided in Box 3.9 below illustrates how disability in youth not only adversely affects current livelihoods, but can also compromises future chances due to the inability of the disabled to attend school. Food security strategies of a group of the disabled interviewed in Chuta Sedu kebele (Gimbi woreda, West Wellega) were described as follows: “selling chat, coffee (if available), selling fuelwood and charcoal which are illegal, eating smaller quantities, skipping meals, looking for handouts, eating root crops (if available), drinking a cup of coffee to kill the appetite, and often starving”. (PPA Report No.16, p.21)

Box 3.9 Vulnerable Disabled Girl

“My mother is old and does not like my going to school. I work on whatever requires doing at home. I collect firewood, keep sheep, fetch water and do other household work like cooking food and making coffee. I got as far as grade 8 in school. I am afraid I may fail the regional exam because I have not been able to study due to working. If I fail, what will be my fate? The regulations do not allow me to attend more than one year in one grade.

Those who rent in our land do not give priority to collecting and threshing our harvest. They do us after they have completed their own and other farmers’ crops. Due to late harvesting, my mother has to borrow grain. This happens every year.”

Polio virus infected girl, Bakelo EA, Basona Werana woreda

Source: PPA Site Report No.10, Bakelo kebele, Basona Werana woreda, North Shewa, Amhara Region, p.81 (edited)

The examination of children as a vulnerable group bring out different issues from those of the various categories of adult considered so far. A first point is that children’s vulnerability to food insecurity is closely related to that of their parents or grandparents or whoever else looks after them, and therefore the children of other vulnerable groups discussed here – the landless, female headed households, the disabled or chronically ill – are themselves in the same vulnerable circumstances. Secondly, however, children face other vulnerabilities too: labour in the family from a young age, being excluded from school due to the work needs of their families, having to take employment with others in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed, being abused and beaten by the adults for whom they work. The two case-studies provided in Box 3.10 below provide examples of the circumstances of children unable to tend school, in one case due to the responsibilities of becoming a household head at a young age.

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As stated in one of the PPA rural site reports “poor children do various jobs to support their family or themselves. They collect fuelwood, fetch water, pick coffee, clean household, make coffee, sell bread, carry goods on market days, shine shoes, plaster mud houses, do daily labour for others, do peddling.” There are clearly marked gender differences in these activities with boys much more likely to be involved in weeding, herding or harvesting and girls in grinding flour, making injera and wot, and collecting firewood and water. A widespread finding was that children from poor or vulnerable households only ate two meals a day (in the morning and evening). The reasons cited for not sending children to school (esp. girls) were not just to do with household labour needs, but also the costs of schooling itself (uniforms, exercise books and pencils).

Box 3.10 Vulnerable Children and Absence from School

“My parents are divorced. I am living with my mother and my younger sister. No one supports us. I was going to school, but I dropped out after some months of attending grade one. I am unable to go to school, even though I would like to, because if I went to school the family would not have anything to eat.”

16-year old vulnerable child in Mehal Amba, Habru woreda

“I live with my old grandparents since both my parents are dead. I do not go to school, rather I fetch water early in the morning then keep livestock and collect firewood. I would like to go to school and I want to play with other children. I asked my grandparents to send me to school. But they were not willing.”

10-year old orphan child in Mehal Amba, Habru woreda

Source: PPA Site Report No.8, Mehal Amba kebele, Habru woreda, North Wollo, Amhara Region, p.77 (edited)

In summary of this section, vulnerability to acute food insecurity in rural Ethiopia is not just a general problem that affects all people equally in particular drought-prone geographical areas. There are social groups that are more likely to be vulnerable than others, and these groups may be food insecure even in places that are in other respects not regarded as requiring food security interventions. The main social groups identified as vulnerable are the landless, the elderly, female-headed households, the disabled or those with chronic illness, and pastoralist communities. In addition, children within all these groups are vulnerable, and not just to food insecurity, but also to exclusion from school with long term adverse consequences for their livelihood chances later in life.

3.5 Mobility and MigrationOne of the central themes of the PPA was to gain a better understanding of human mobility in Ethiopia: the extent to which people regarded moving around and living in different places the norm; the social or administrative barriers to mobility where these can be identified; the reasons for mobility where it occurs; and the gains or losses to people’s livelihoods by

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engaging in more mobile lifestyles. For this purpose, mobility is used as a general term to describe all types of population movement including, for example, for trading or going to secondary school; while migration refers to seasonal, cyclical, or more permanent movements in pursuit of new jobs or resettlement in a different part of Ethiopia.

A general finding is that levels of mobility are fairly moderate in Ethiopia compared to other countries with similar per capita incomes and economic structures. In general, people stay in or near their communities, and travel relatively little and comparatively short distances. A lot of travel is of the type that can be accomplished there-and-back in a day (to market, or to visit relatives in an adjacent village, or to go to the woreda town to make some purchases). School children going beyond the school grades available in the nearby school are often away at school during the week, and those that go to certain types of secondary school and to higher education will go away for the entire school term. As we have already noted in preceding sections of this report, there is not a well-developed non-farm economy and labour market in rural Ethiopia (unless one lives near one of the large towns), and therefore there is not a lot of regular labour mobility associated with non-farm economic activities.

Several reasons that emerge from the PPA rural site reports explain this lack of mobility. One is that the cost of travel is relatively high in comparison to the ability of farm households to generate cash. This occurs in part due to the conditions of rural roads, the distances and time involved, and the service provided which may take the form of a single private pickup truck. In some communities, even a pickup truck only visited the village once or twice a week. It also occurs because so many farmers do not produce a marketed surplus, so that they do not have cash to spend on transport or purchases outside the village; nor is there a reason for vehicles to visit the village more often since there is not much produce to purchase or transport from there. In one PPA site, the community stated “agricultural marketing is not a problem for this community because surplus is not being produced” (PPA Report No.3, p.5)

A second set of reasons are social and cultural. There is a broad view in rural Ethiopia that migration represents a failure of some sort in relation to being able to exist adequately in one’s own community. Amongst the 31 PPA rural sites, quite definitely negative attitudes to migration were expressed in 6 of them (20 per cent). In 4 of these mobility or migration of adult women was socially unacceptable (even “forbidden”), and in most other sites it was regarded as to be avoided if at all possible. The main assumption about migration by young adult women is that it would certainly be for prostitution, and therefore social ostracism would tend to follow movement away from the community to seek work. In 10 communities (30 per cent of the sample) migration by males was regarded more positively, although often with some degree of reluctance. It was recognised that migration can bring benefits to the family that stays behind – earnings or remittances that can be used to strengthen their livelihoods in the future – but it was also considered regrettable that this had to be the case. Nevertheless there was quite wide recognition in many PPA sites that migration was likely to increase in the future, due to the inability of farming to provide everyone in the community with an adequate livelihood.

A third set of reasons are administrative or to do with future land access. While not very clear from the PPA site reports, it is apparent that people’s movements are monitored quite closely by kebele administrations, and it is advisable in many circumstances to have cleared any planned travel with the relevant officials before setting out, for otherwise trouble will follow. The reasons for this are given as “security” or “crime avoidance”, but nevertheless there may be an overall effect that discourages rather than encourages mobility. It is widely perceived

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Box 3.11 A Case-Study of Resettlement and Migration

The male key informant was born in Raya and Kobbo woreda, Wollo province. He is 52 years old. He and his wife and two children were among people settled in Meru Ekele PA, Metu woreda, Illubabor, by the government due to the severe famine of EC 1977 in northern Ethiopia. Since the settlers came to the new place empty handed, the government provided them with food, farming implements, oxen and seed for two consecutive years. In these first two years the output from the farm was extremely low. In EC 1979 the assistance from the government stopped.

Fortunately, he became a self-sufficient and independent farmer from EC 1979 until the end of EC 1984. In EC 1984 he fell sick. Since he had a surplus stock of grains, the family stayed in the same place with the ailing he until the beginning of EC 1985. Unable to recover after repeated visits to health services, he decided to sell most of his property including 2 thatched houses, an ox, a cow, 4 sacks of corn and 1/16 ha coffee land, in order to return to his native place in Wollo, thinking that a change of environment would assist his recovery. Other settler friends returned to Wollo with him. They did not notify the PA officials about their leaving, or that they might come back.

After regaining full health, the informant came back to Meru Ekele PA to restart his life in May EC 1986. However, his grain land had by then been allocated to the person who had bought his coffee land and house. He could not regain it as it was assumed in his absence, by the PA, that he would not come back to the community and the land was allotted to a person in need. He lost his membership of the PA as he had no landholding. Since then he has been dependent on a friend’s help in giving him a small tract of grain land temporarily for his living, and his wife’s brother gave him land for construction of a house. The household obtains enough food from this borrowed land to last six months.

The returnee informant narrated his predicament after he left for Wollo as follows. “No one accepted me at my birthplace and I could not assimilate there. I requested farmland at my birthplace but the PA and woreda officials responded negatively, saying there was no rule or regulation to accept a returnee from a resettlement area. After I returned to Meru Ekele I did not request the PA for land because of my mistakes. I felt too embarrassed to ask for farmland.” Finally he commented that from his experience he did not think that migration would increase much in the future.

Source: PPA Site Report No.17, Meru Ekele kebele, Metu woreda, Illubabor, Oromia Region, pp.31-2 (edited)

that migration beyond a certain duration will result in forfeit of the land rights of the person concerned by the kebele administration. In some sites it was also reported that engagement in non-farm activities such as trading in consumer goods would result in forfeit of a person’s rights over land. In these matters, people’s perceptions may not represent official policy, but nevertheless they are strong enough to receive frequent mention by PPA respondents.

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Having mapped out reasons why mobility and migration are fairly low profile aspects of rural life in Ethiopia, it is true of course that a certain amount of migration does take place, and the level and nature of this also emerges from the PPA rural sites. Amongst the 31 rural sites, seasonal or permanent inward migration was reported in 9 of them (29 per cent), while seasonal or permanent outward migration was reported in 27 of them (87 per cent). However, within this latter figure, 6 sites used the words “little” or “low” to describe the extent of such migration. Most migration, whether inward or outward, is seasonal migration for agricultural purposes, typically crop harvesting. Thus individuals will travel from their home villages to participate in the coffee harvest in coffee producing areas, or people in grain producing areas will take advantage of differences in harvesting dates in different places to move around and participate in teff, barley or wheat harvests.

A different category of migration relates to resettlement. Some resettlement occurs due to formal government schemes, while some occurs spontaneously with families moving to places where they have heard that there is abundant land. Formal resettlement outwards was mentioned in 7 of the rural PPA sites (23 per cent), while inward resettlement was mentioned in 2 of them. In several cases, resettlement involved as many as 400-500 households. It was clear from these cases that resettlement represents mixed experiences for individuals and communities (see Box 3.11). Several communities reported quite high proportions of returnees from resettlement schemes; while being chosen as the recipient place for inward settlers is not popular with the recipient communities who felt that their own future access to land was being compromised.

Box 3.12 Case-Study Returnee Migrant

The migrant left his home community in Chichu kebele (Gedeo zone, SNNP) at age 15 in EC 1992 and went to Gotiti 80 km away (but still in Gedeo zone) searching for a job and due to family conflict. He spent 4 years there, then returned in EC 1995. His reasons for returning were that he did not feel comfortable in the community that he migrated into. He did not have the right to express himself freely in that society, as he was not a member of the main ethnic group there. He was wrongly arrested and accused of theft. He worked in a butchery, but the owner failed to pay him back wages amounting to 1000 birr. He advises others not to go out from their original place. If one has finance and land, working in one’s birthplace is better than migrating out.

Source: PPA Site Report No.36, Chichu kebele, Wenago woreda, Gedeo zone, SNNP Region, pp.52-3 (edited)

Yet another reason for migration is quite simply hunger. Many communities reported out-migration in particular years (for example, EC 1995) in search of opportunities to generate cash to buy food due to crop failure in their own place. For others, the reverse happened with influxes of people from somewhere else in search of a means of securing food. For example, in Shebet kebele, Lay Gayint woreda, South Gonder, it was reported that up to 60 people arrive in the community every two years at harvest time due to food crop failures in their home communities of Sekota woreda and elsewhere in Lay Gayint. Some of these individuals

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end up staying for 4 or 5 months, if they can secure some work and support from Shebet families.

In summary of the PPA findings on mobility and migration, it seems true to say that rural Ethiopians are, in general, reluctant movers. In part, this is simply a matter of economic opportunity. There are relatively few firm or reliable alternatives to dependence on farming and therefore people tend to look inwards rather than outwards for securing their livelihoods. In part, also, it reflects social and administrative attitudes and practices that tend to reinforce each other in regarding mobility and migration unfavourably (see Box 3.12 for an example).

Migration that does take place is mainly for seasonal agricultural reasons, or in order to participate in official resettlement schemes that shift people from one place to another within the agricultural sector. Migration to towns is relatively low and to the extent that it occurs, it mainly comprises migration by young adult males in search of employment opportunities, given their shrinking ability to participate in agriculture back in their home communities.

3.6 Institutions and Quality of ServicesThe PPA research sought to identify the most important institutions in people’s lives in rural Ethiopia. The emphasis was placed on institutions or organisations that are regarded by ordinary citizens as helping them to improve their livelihoods, rather those having a purely cultural function in rural society. Nevertheless, this separation is not easy to make in practice since many social institutions possess both cultural significance and help people to manage their livelihoods through work sharing, or saving behaviour, or help with household costs at a time of crisis such as the death of a household member. The institutional analysis also needed to cover more formal organisations, especially those government agencies and services that have direct and indirect effects on people’s lives.

The study of institutions in rural communities had several dimensions. One was to obtain a fairly complete listing of different institutions or organisations either present in the community or accessed nearby. The second was to ask about the functioning of these institutions, their coverage of people in the community, and whether they discharged their functions well or not. The third dimension was for institutions to be scored for their importance and their effectiveness on a scale of 1-3 (for example, 1=important; 2=medium important; 3=not important). The fourth dimension was to combine the discussion up to that point into an institutional ranking, in which community members would agree upon a rank ordering of different institutions from best or most important down to least important institution. The fifth dimension was to obtain more details on the quality of public and private services (education, health, extension, veterinary etc.). A great deal of detail about local institutions was uncovered by this approach.

Institutional scoring and ranking represent certain problems for summarising research findings. These are subjective exercises that can vary greatly according to how the discussion about institutions is managed by research facilitators. There is a tendency for respondents to tell researchers what they think the researchers want to hear, especially if the researchers are seen as representing “authority” in some way. Due to this effect, the good working of local administration can be over-stated, and this especially occurs if there are officials of the kebele in the discussion group.

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Moreover, there is always an underlying difficulty between the “importance” that the community attaches to the institution (for example, the importance people attach to primary education), and the “effectiveness” or “quality” of the working of the institution (the school may lack desks, books and teachers). In general, the “importance” criterion tends to dominate over the “quality” criterion in group discussions about ranking. Fortunately, quality issues regarding service delivery were asked about independently of the institutional ranking, and therefore a separate set of observations about service quality were generated by the PPA.

Overall, about 70 different “institutions” were identified as being important in ordinary citizens’ lives or livelihoods across the 31 rural research sites. Many of these were institutions unique to particular places (for example, “herder’s father” or “Ambasel trading company”), or were countrywide institutions that happened only to be mentioned once (for example, “police” or “forestry department”). In total 45 institutions were only mentioned one to three times across the institutional scoring and ranking exercises. In seeking to summarise the picture across all rural sites, certain simplifications were made to the raw information collected in each site:

similar institutions with different names or slightly differing roles were combined into a single grouping;

institutions that were mentioned in only 1-4 cases across all 31 sites were dropped from the ranking analysis described below;

this left 22 institutions (or grouped similar institutions) for the further analysis of institutional ranking.

The ranking of these 22 institutions was looked at in four different ways, in order to examine different facets of the priority placed by respondents on different institutions, and also in order to test the strength of the findings. These four ways are summarised and compared in Table 3.12 below, and they comprise:

(1) simple count of the number of times, across 31 rural sites, that an institution was included in the ranking exercise by respondents;

(2) count of the number of times that an institution was ranked 1st, 2nd, or 3rd across the 31 rural sites;

(3) count of the number of times that an institution was ranked between 1st and 5th across the 31 rural sites;

(4) average rank for that institution across the number of sites for which it was included in the ranking.

For the final one of these, the average rank was calculated using a statistical formula that reduces the influence of isolated large numbers on the average (see note to Table 3.12). For example, if an institution is given a rank of 1 across 5 sites and a rank of 12 in one site, then the simple mean across the 6 sites would be heavily influenced by the presence of the single adverse ranking. The formula lessens this effect while conserving the relative ordering given by the ranking across study sites.

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Table 3.19 Comparison of Alternative Rankings of Institutions in Rural Ethiopia (31 PPA Sites)

Frequency Included in Ranking Frequency Ranked in Top 3 Frequency Ranked in Top 5 Average Ranking Across Sites*

Rank Institution Count Rank Institution Count Rank Institution Count Rank Institution R1 school 29 1 school 21 1 school 24 1 school 2.52 kebele admin 26 2 idir 10 2 idir 13 2 markets/traders 3.53 DA 25 3 kebele admin 9 3 DA 12 3 NGOs 3.74 church/mosque 22 4 health post 9 4 health post 11 4 idir 3.85 idir 21 5 DA 7 5 kebele admin 10 5 kebele admin 4.96 health post 20 6 NGOs 7 6 church/mosque 8 6 DA 4.97 peace committee 16 7 church/mosque 5 7 NGOs 7 7 health post 4.98 NGO 13 8 peace committee 4 8 peace committee 7 8 peace committee 5.19 women's assoc 13 9 credit institute 2 9 credit institute 4 9 credit institute 5.310 youth assoc 11 10 debo 2 10 debo 2 10 church/mosque 6.011 credit institute 10 11 markets/traders 2 11 markets/traders 2 11 kebele militia 6.412 farmers coop 9 12 youth assoc 1 12 youth assoc 2 12 gott and gare 6.713 debo 8 13 political party 1 13 kebele militia 2 13 debo 7.114 political party 8 14 vet post 1 14 private services 2 14 grinding mill 7.915 vet post 8 15 gott and gare 1 15 farmers coop 2 15 private services 8.116 gott and gare 6 16 grinding mill 1 16 political party 1 16 farmers coop 8.117 iquib 6 17 kebele militia 1 17 vet post 1 17 youth assoc 8.318 farmers assoc 5 18 private services 1 18 gott and gare 1 18 iquib 8.419 grinding mill 5 19 women's assoc 0 19 grinding mill 1 19 women's assoc 8.620 kebele militia 5 20 farmers coop 0 20 women's assoc 1 20 political party 9.221 markets/traders 5 21 iquib 0 21 iquib 0 21 vet post 10.022 private services 5 22 FA 0 22 FA 0 22 FA 10.2

Source: Community reports for 31 rural PPA sites* Average rank (R) calculated according to the formula R = (∑√r/n)2 , where r = rank number given at each site, and n the number of sites.

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Having undertaken this exercise, it became apparent that institutional significance in a rural community is captured in part simply by the number of times an institution is included in the ranking across study sites, and in part by the actual priority ordering that is given to different institutions. As shown in Table 3.12 the most frequently mentioned institutions were, in descending order, the school, the kebele administration, the development agent (agricultural extension), the church/mosque (formal religious institutions), idir, and the health post. When looking at the three summary methods based on the rank ordering of institutions, the same 5 institutions tend to recur towards the top of the rankings. This is especially so for the school, idir, and the kebele administration which can be taken to be the priority three institutions in communities across rural Ethiopia.

The key difference, of course, between counting and ranking is that the latter incorporates increasingly critical views about how well the institution works as you move down the scale towards the bottom end of the ranking. Thus, for example, veterinary services are widely regarded across most of rural Ethiopia as being weak and inadequate, even though they are also considered to be an important institution. They come out as 21 st in the average ranking across study sites. Women’s associations feature as 9th in the counting exercise, but 19th in the average ranking, because many people felt that they were a recent innovation that had been imposed on the community from outside.

A sense of the true importance of different institutions for rural citizens is provided by their relative stability across these different measures. In addition to schools, idir, and the kebele, the agricultural extension system (development agents – DAs), peace committees (often stated as “elders committee” or other conflict resolution body), NGOs (both foreign and local), and formal religious institutions are reliably in the top ten institutions according to all the different measures. A wide variety of local and international NGOs were found either to be currently operating, or had operated in the recent past, in the case study sites, and their efforts are typically highly regarded by ordinary citizens.

Some shifts in ordering occur between the average ranking across sites and other measures. For example “markets” (meaning access to market places) is the second most highly rated institution in the average ranking. However, this must be set against the fact that only 5 sites listed “markets” at all in the ranking exercise. On balance, it is the middle two exercises (the frequency with which an institution is ranked in the top 3 or top 5 institutions) that probably provide the most accurate picture of people’s current institutional priorities in rural Ethiopia. Incidentally, the credit institutions referred to in these lists refer to the semi-autonomous regional credit agencies known as DECSI, ACSI, OCSI etc. in the different regions.

There is no doubt that schooling has the highest priority of all institutions in rural Ethiopia. However, the separate investigation of the quality of service provision reveals that much remains to be done to improve the quality of the educational experience for students. Lack of desks, textbooks, exercise books and qualified teachers is mentioned with respect to service delivery in numerous rural PPA sites. For those sites that reported the data, teacher:pupil ratios were in the range 1:60 to 1:100 in rural primary schools. A feature mentioned in no less than 17 reports (60 per cent of all sites) was the absence of potable water in or near schools, meaning that toilet and wash facilities were minimal and students had to carry their own water to school.11

11 These findings are supported by qualitative responses in the 2004 WMS for the same rural EAs. In the WMS 60.5 per cent of respondents mentioned shortage of books, 41.4 per cent

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Communities do not in general mind contributing to the provision of materials and labour time to school building; they do, however, find monetary contributions difficult, especially if they are in the poor or very poor social groups. Here, even minor contributions to building costs (10-15 birr per year) or to daily school costs (sometimes 1-2 birr per month for the school guard) can be an imposition on their already precarious livelihood circumstances, and may result in many of the poor not sending their children to school at all.

Like schools, primary healthcare facilities in rural areas are highly rated, but suffer from rather similar defects related to trained personnel and supplies (in this case, supplies of drugs). Out of the 31 rural sites, 15 had a health post on site or in close proximity to the kebele. In other cases, the nearest health post was often 10-15 km away. There were a few reports of good service at health posts (4 sites), but problems were reported at most other sites including negative attitudes of health workers, absenteeism, and lack of medicines. The policy for charging in different health posts seemed to vary greatly from free consultations to 10 or 15 birr per consultation, and likewise varying sums for treatment or medicines.12

The relative success of agricultural extension efforts has been mentioned elsewhere in this report. Unlike other services, extension agents receive more positive than negative reactions both for the existence of the service itself, and its impact on improving livelihoods. The high regard of the service is indicated by its position in the institutional rankings given in Table 3.12. In 16 of the 31 rural sites, extension agents either lived on site or nearby in the kebele and were available to give advice on a regular basis. At least 6 sites had access to the full range of 3 agents covering different specialisations. In some sites, groups of farmers had been to farmer field schools.

Of course, there are some departures from this generally encouraging picture. Five sites (16 per cent) reported “rare” visits by extension agents. In a similar number of sites, respondents expressed dissatisfaction rather than satisfaction with the service provided. This usually corresponded to lack of visits or absenteeism. In some cases, community members thought that wrong decisions had been made concerning the construction method and location of ponds for water harvesting (including one site where it was remarked that ponds had been located inside coffee plantations). In two sites, respondents complained that extension agents only gave advice to better off farmers, and ignored the poorer members of the community.

The position with regard to veterinary services is quite different from that regarding extension. It is unclear from the PPA reports the extent to which government intends to provide a useful veterinary service, or expects the private or NGO sector to step into a gap in public provision. Local vet services (“vet posts”) were only available in 2 out of the 31 rural sites, most of the remaining sites made reference to a woreda level service that was typically 10-30 km away. It was rare for public vet officers to visit farmers on site (perhaps once a year in some places), and, if feasible to do so, people sometimes carried sick animals to the woreda post. Satisfaction with the service was only expressed in 2 sites, while respondents in 16 sites (52 per cent) actively expressed dissatisfaction. Reference was made in some sites to

mentioned classroom shortages, 31.1 per cent equipment deficits, and 28.3 per cent shortage of teachers.

12 Again health service deficiencies mentioned in the PPA are supported by qualitative WMS data, in which cost, drug shortage, too many patients, and lack of health professionals are the main problems identified by respondents.

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private provision, however, it was evident that the costs of this would be beyond most rural citizens.

Attitudes to public veterinary services reveal the importance of probing beyond institutional rankings in the PPA. The need for a responsive veterinary service is highly rated in communities and with good reason: loss of livestock to disease is one of the most cited causes for downward livelihood trajectories. However, the existing service appears not to provide livestock owners with a means of avoiding the loss of livestock to commonplace diseases. A re-examination of veterinary policy seems to be indicated by PPA findings in this area.

3.7 Governance, Empowerment and TaxationGovernance refers to how power, authority, laws, rules, taxes, expenditures, the police, local and central government work for ordinary citizens and for poor people. While the word ‘government’ refers to the formal structures of central and local public office; the word ‘governance’ refers to how efficient, effective, fair and honest are the actions of public officers. The idea of governance applies equally to the community’s own leaders, as well as to external officials.

There are three main aspects of governance that were investigated in the Ethiopia PPA. The first of these was people’s sense of ‘empowerment’ i.e. whether people feel that they are more able than before to express their views about things that affect their livelihoods, such as education, health and other services; and to hold public officials to account if things are done badly. The second was about administration and the exercise of power and authority, and how restrictive this is on people’s options. Also here, it was considered important to discover whether institutions of local government provide an enabling or facilitating context for people to improve their lives; or whether, by contrast, they create a blocking and disabling context that makes it even more difficult for people to improve their lives. The third was about taxes and fees in rural areas – covering what is taxed, how it is taxed, who gets taxed, and for what purposes taxes or fees or dues are required.

Under the heading of empowerment, there was widespread agreement across most rural communities that ordinary citizens were nowadays more able to express their views and opinions freely than was the case five or ten years ago. Indeed community groups in 25 out of the 31 rural PPA sites (over 81 per cent) stated that this was the case, and only in 6 sites were people of the opinion that no significant change in this regard had taken place. A similar finding also occurs with respect to people’s awareness of their rights as citizens i.e. the rights to be treated fairly, to be listened to seriously, and to receive certain standards of public service from government. Here 19 out of 23 rural sites that commented on this issue (83 per cent) stated that they were more aware of their rights than before.

Interestingly, a positive advance noted in several of the rural sites in Oromia and SNNP was the ability to engage in dialogue with officials in one’s own language rather than in Amharic. It is also worth noting that replies to many of the empowerment questions were often gendered, with men expressing more enthusiasm or optimism about new rights and freedoms, and women being more sceptical as to whether any real change had taken place.

Of course, awareness of rights and ability to express views is only one side of a two-way process, and equally important is the response of local officials to opinions and complaints. Here people’s responses were rather less enthusiastic. In 11 sites, people said that despite

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being able to express their views more freely, they nevertheless feared retribution from officials if they did this too often or too openly. A typical response is reported as follows “they also explained that people in the community do not complain to district officials when something goes wrong . . . [this is] because of fear of revenge from the officials or leaders of the district” (PPA Report No.9, p.95). The words “threat” and “ revenge” recur quite often in the PPA site reports in this context, as also does the accusation by officials of being a member of an opposition political party if one complained.

In 17 rural sites, it was considered that the response to complaints was slow or non-existent (74 per cent of sites that reported on this aspect). However, 3 sites reported positively on the responsiveness of local officials, and divergent views were apparent in another 3 sites. In only 2 sites did people say that officials had provided them with information on rights or services; the majority response here (10 out of 13 sites) was that officials never called meetings in order to inform citizens of benefits they were trying to bring to the community (or that the community had a right to), and almost always called meetings when they needed the community to do something, or so that they could issue orders.

There were mixed views on issues of law and justice in rural communities, although these topics were only commented upon in about half the PPA rural sites. In 4 sites, the opinion was voiced that justice systems had improved in fairness and efficiency; while in 9 sites the opposite opinion was put forward. A clear distinction was often made between dispute settlement within the kebele (usually considered to work quite well), whereas legal proceedings in the formal justice system were slow, costly, and not always considered fair.

Clearly, there is not yet a great deal of political plurality in rural Ethiopia. This is perhaps not surprising given the turbulence of the country’s recent political history. In 21 out of 25 sites that commented on this question only the single (ruling) political party operated. In 4 sites, political choice was available, and in 1 site the opposition political party was stronger than the government party (with apparently no problem in this being the case in that particular woreda).

In summary of the PPA findings on empowerment in rural Ethiopia, there are positive indications that ordinary citizens are permitted greater voice and have more awareness of their basic human rights than has been the case in the past. At the same time, the attitudes of officials tend towards the unresponsive, uninformative, and resistant to engaging in a more equal dialogue with citizens. To some degree this no doubt reflects real constraints on the ability to respond to complaints (for example, real budget constraints). However, empowerment requires dialogue and a predisposition on the part of those with responsibility to help if they can, as well as more openness about the reasons for being unable to respond where that is the case.

Respondents were asked various questions designed to discover their freedom of movement, and their ability to come and go from market places without barriers being placed in their way. The general case is for people to be able to move freely, subject, as might be expected, to social constraints (as pertain to adult women in many places) and to carrying personal ID at all times. However, in 8 communities (25 per cent) kebele officials had to be informed if a journey was outside the jurisdiction of the kebele or involved an overnight stay. There was a sense in some reports that local administration kept a very close eye on people’s movements and activities, although the degree to which this might inhibit individual initiative is difficult to assess. In general, again, the movement of crops and livestock does not require a permit,

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but in some kebeles livestock movements out of the kebele need official consent. Roadblocks are relatively rare in rural Ethiopia, except in places where chat is traded, or on main roads in order to tax chat or control the movement of contraband goods.

It is apparent from the PPA rural research that local administration at the kebele level is often structured around organising people’s social participation and monitoring their movements and activities. The purpose is to harness citizen’s energy more effectively towards collective community goals (such as building classrooms, clearing irrigation canals, installing water pipes etc.). In some places, these community obligations must be met in order to get a kebele permit to travel away from the community, for example, for an overnight stay, or for seasonal migration, or for visiting town.

While the positive effects of community obligation are recognised, the opposing danger of stifling individual initiative needs also to be considered. Elaborate social monitoring of this kind has the potential to inhibit choice, mobility, exchange and flexibility since everyone knows everyone else’s business, and there is a risk that any departures from “normal” behaviour are regarded as breaking one rule or another. Most taxes in rural Ethiopia are determined by regional administrations which set rules and rates that are passed down to woreda administrations for implementation. This applies to business taxes, vehicle taxes, income taxes and so on. In these cases, the woreda acts as the tax collection agent for regional or national governments. However, there are important categories of tax that are more under woreda control, and that are applied by kebele administrations or the woreda, with the revenue collected staying at the woreda level. These include land taxes, market dues, and various license fees, as well as other charges that may apply at kebele or woreda level.

Ethiopia is fortunate at some time in the past to have successfully established the land tax as a form of rural taxation acceptable to rural citizens, and one that lends itself potentially to being progressive with respect to income. In most other low income countries, property taxes have never featured, are exceedingly difficult to put in place due to vested interests, and their lack causes district governments to have a persistently weak tax base. The rural PPA reports reveal few complaints about land taxes, or about other taxes that are applied at local levels. The land tax is actually a combined tax that includes a farm size component and an agricultural output component; however, since these components are linked through a linear formula, they operate in practice as a single tax (see Table 3.13 for an example).

The main complaint about the land tax is not its level, but the fact that it is collected immediately after harvest. This has the effect of pushing farmers to sell their crops at harvest time, when prices are at their lowest, and leaving them with lower reserves for a future date. The same occurs with repayment of credit and fertilizer loans. There is a difficult balance here between ease of collection when farmers have cash, and causing adverse effects in grain markets by discouraging the storage of crops for sale later.

Land taxes vary in different parts of the country, but are generally in the range of 20 to 50 birr according to the farm size of the taxpayer, as well as their marital and family size status (Table 3.13). While there is often provision in the regulations for higher taxes than this, the higher rates seldom apply, because few people have the farm sizes that would correspond to those rates. In addition to land taxes, citizens pay crop and livestock taxes when they take produce to market. These taxes are typically in the ranges of 2-4 birr per quintal (100 kg) for

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crops, 2-5 birr per head of cattle, 2 birr per donkey, and 0.5-3 birr per sheep or goat. Taxes on chat are very much higher at 2-3 birr/kg, and coffee tax was cited in one report at 8 birr per 100 kg.

Interestingly, the levies that attract adverse comments in villages are not these land taxes or market dues, but a range of other fees that do not seem to offer any relationship between tax paid and service provided. For example, individuals or households pay a sports fee (1-2 birr per year), a red cross fee (1-2 birr per year), a “newspaper” fee (0.5-1 birr per year). In addition they may be required to pay an annual “contribution” to the kebele administration (10-15 birr per year), or to celebrate the anniversary of the ruling party (5-15 birr per year). Parents with children at school must sometimes contribute money as well as labour and materials to school buildings (up to 15 birr per year), or to school maintenance (3-5 birr per year), or to the school guard (0.5 to 1 birr per year). Contributions may also be required for the clinic guard (0.5 to 1 birr per year), or the DA’s horse (1 birr per year).

Table 3.20 Land and Farm Income Tax Rates, Basona Werana woreda

No. Land Size (ha)

Land Size (timad)

Use of LandTax

Agricultural Income Tax Total

Birr Cent Birr Cent Birr Cent1 Up to 0.5 Up to 2 10 00 10 00 20 002 0.5-1.0 From 2 -4 12 00 13 00 25 003 1.0-1.5 From 4 -6 14 00 16 00 30 004 1.5-.0 From 6 -8 16 00 19 00 35 005 2.0-.5 From 8-10 18 00 22 00 40 006 > 2.5 > 10 20 00 25 00 45 00

Source: Woreda Finance and Planning Office, Basona Werana, North Shewa, Amhara Region

These are in general very small sums of money, but they have the important characteristic that they hit the poor more than the better off. Indeed, for families who barely manage to generate cash (because they never have produce to sell) these small fees can be a severe imposition, and this emerges from comments made in PPA discussions. In addition, the various costs around schooling can cause the poor not to send their children to school in order to avoid the charges involved. While PPA findings are too fragmented to reach firm conclusions on this matter, it would seem useful for government to review kebele level charges from the viewpoint of their impact on the poor, and perhaps to develop guidelines that would have the intention of excluding the poor from such charges altogether.

It has been noted elsewhere in this report that mobility and exchange are weakly developed in rural Ethiopia, and this especially manifests itself in the relatively low level of non-farm activities going on in rural areas. Indeed the only non-farm activities that receive regular mention are the production of the various local alcoholic drinks (tela etc.) and trading or selling of the same. There are reasons for this that go beyond conventional explanations of transport costs, remoteness, low market development and so on. There is a widespread perception in rural Ethiopia that engagement in non-farm activities can result in forfeiting one’s entitlement to land and its re-allocation by the kebele administration to other families.

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In other words, people must choose in an absolute sense whether to stay wholly in agriculture or to engage wholly in non-farm business, no mixed strategy is permitted.

Whether this perception is an accurate reflection of official policy or not, the mere fact that it is raised as an issue in several reports is a source of serious concern for poverty reduction policy. Not only can mixing farm and non-farm activities reduce vulnerability at the family level, it can also result in improved agricultural practices, and cause dynamic growth processes to occur in rural areas. This is so because it reduces risk, ameliorates the adverse effects of seasonality, generates cash that can be spent on farm inputs, and creates new economic activity. Actively discouraging people from leaving agriculture should properly have no place in a poverty reduction strategy.

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Chapter 4 PPA Findings for Urban Communities

4.1 The PPA Urban Research SitesThis chapter of the report sets out the findings for the urban PPA sites. The research was conducted in selected urban areas of 13 different towns and cities in Ethiopia. There were two urban sites in the capital city, Addis Ababa, and therefore 14 different sites were researched in total. All 10 regional capitals were represented in the PPA, and in addition 3 additional cities were selected in order to represent other important urban centres across the country. These were Dessie, Jimma and Arba Minch towns. The spatial distribution of the 14 urban sites is illustrated in Figure 4.1 below, and the list of towns and communities is given in Table 4.1. At the time that the research teams went into the field, Asayita town was still the administrative capital of Afar Region; however, the decision was taken at around this time to switch the capital to Semera town. The PPA research was conducted in Asayita town.

Figure 4.3 Urban PPA Research Sites by Town Name

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Table 4.21 The Urban PPA Research Locations

Region Zone Town/Sub-City Name Community Name

Tigray Mekele Mekele Adi IslamAfar Zone 1 Asayita Enchet SeferAmhara Dessie Dessie Segno GebeyaAmhara Bahir Dar Bahir Dar MenaheriaOromia East Shewa Nazret Sar SeferOromia Jimma Jimma Hirmata MertinaSomalia Jijiga Jijiga DugdahadeB-Gumuz Asosa Asosa Gebreiel SeferSNNP Sidama Awasa Arbe SeferSNNP Arba Minch Arba Minch Netch SareDire Dawa Dire Dawa Town Dire Dawa Filwhoa

AsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayitaAsayita

Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2)Addis Ababa (2) HararHararHararHararHararHararHararHararHarar

Dire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire DawaDire Dawa

JijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijigaJijiga

MekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekeleMekele

JimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimmaJimma

Arba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba MinchArba Minch

DessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessieDessie

Bahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir DarBahir Dar

NazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazretNazret

AsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosaAsosa

AwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasaAwasa

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Harari Hundene Harar Buda AberAddis Ababa Addis Ababa Kolfie Keraniyo KetemaAddis Ababa Addis Ababa Arada Doboka

Because the PPA focused on the circumstances of the poor and on the conditions under which they can construct their own routes out of poverty, a further site selection occurred within cities in order to conform with these criteria. Thus selected sites were in poor districts of towns and cities, and especially in places representing a mixture of new migrants and established households. In most cases, these were places of poor housing quality, including “shanty town” types of temporary shelter as well as houses constructed with mud walls and thatch or corrugated iron roofs. Even within such areas, better off households are observed to possess higher quality housing with brick or block or cement walls, cement floor, and good quality roofs. Urban sites were mostly located on the edge of towns since this is typically where poorer areas are found, nevertheless some inner city poor sites were also investigated.

Urban poverty analysis differs from the rural in important ways. Rather than livestock and farm land, the key assets are people’s houses and their access to urban services (water supply, sewerage, toilets, electricity, telephony etc.). Education and health are, of course, public services that are equally important across both rural and urban areas. Urban citizens depend on wage employment and self-employment rather than farming for their livelihoods. Seasonality is less important than in rural areas, although urban activities connected to agriculture (such as buying and selling coffee) evidently tend to follow the same seasonal peaks and troughs as the corresponding agricultural harvests.

As was found to be true of the rural qualitative data, there are many patterns that are discovered to apply across all poor urban districts, irrespective of the towns where they are located. Other factors are special to particular towns, or to the selected sites within towns. Good experiences in some towns can be useful for indicating policy directions that may be worth pursuing in other towns.

The urban PPA research reports yielded comparative information on the factors that vary from one town to another that most preoccupy urban residents. In Mekele town, power supply failures were mentioned a lot. In Asayita town, the re-assignment of the regional capital of Afar Region to Semera town was causing a decline in civil service activity, and a consequent loss of jobs and income earning opportunities. Here also, the changing course of the Awash river had detrimental effects on some people’s livelihoods. On the other hand Asayita was about to be linked by an asphalt spur road to the main Dire Dawa highway, so trade and travel would become easier for the town in the future.

In Dire Dawa town, many respondents were out of work due to retrenchment of factory workers from the main textile factory when it was privatised. Also here government efforts to curb contraband trading had resulted in the loss of income earning opportunities. In Harar town, a serious water shortage was people’s main complaint; while in Jijiga town low school enrolment and corruption were mentioned by many respondents. In both Harar and Jijiga towns ethnic or clan biases in service delivery, and in people’s treatment by officials, were considered serious problems; with clan conflict in Jijiga being directly responsible for causing downward trajectories in some people’s livelihoods.

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In Nazret town, the recent prohibition of livestock fattening in the urban area had caused difficulties for some respondents at the research site, for whom this had previously been a significant livelihood activity. In Jimma town, the importance of good coffee harvests and high coffee price levels for the general level of economic activity was apparent. In Awasa town, the main problem brought to the attention of the researchers was the water supply and drainage system, both considered to be in urgent need of updating and replacement. Also, uniquely amongst the PPA towns, Awasa lacked its own hospital. In Arba Minch town, many jobs had been lost as a result of the decline in the lake fishery, said to be due to overfishing and pollution. The Asosa town research site was semi-agricultural on the edge of town, and therefore had more in common with rural PPA sites than with urban ones.

One of the sites in Addis Ababa city, Arada sub-city, is a congested inner city community that is likely to be dismantled and located elsewhere in the city in the future. The community benefited in the recent past from the construction of the adjacent Sheraton Hotel, but a big decline in income earning opportunities then occurred when the Sheraton was completed. In this community, as well as the other Addis Ababa site called Kolfie Keraniyo, the reorganisation of kebeles caused complaints that people no longer knew the officials with whom they had to deal. Other urban sites not so far mentioned individually – Dessie, Bahir Dar – did not have features that stood out as causing a lot of comment for that place, but this does not necessarily mean that those towns do not each have special circumstances that differ from other towns.

4.2 Changing Urban LivelihoodsWhile urbanisation is occurring in Ethiopia, it is not occurring that rapidly compared to the rates that can occur in fast growing economies. The rural share of Ethiopia’s 70 million population remains at 87 per cent, a remarkably high proportion for such a big country. According to the SDPRP, the urban population growth rate is estimated at 6 per cent. This sounds quite high but in the context of the big figures this implies very slow change in the population proportions between rural and urban areas.13

The PPA findings reveal that efforts are being made to improve urban services and environments in all urban centres, but with differing emphases in different places and with more energy in some towns compared to others. Table 4.2 provides summary information on improvements in urban infrastructure noted from key informant interviews and group discussions in the PPA. The most frequently cited improvements are road upgrading, school construction, sewerage and sanitation installation, and provision of communal toilet facilities. Others that are cited a number of times include health posts, market place construction, water supply points, land made available for private house construction, increasing availability of private services (education and health), and programmes to train and provide start-up capital for urban youth.

The small number of instances noted for each of these improvements across the 14 urban sites reflects in part limitations of the participatory methodology: when there are so many different aspects of urban life that can be commented upon, it is not surprising that what is discussed in one place may be neglected for discussion in another place even though it may be a feature that is receiving attention across most towns in Ethiopia. However, it also reflects 13 At this rate of urban population growth, the rural share would fall to about 77 per cent after 10

years, while the absolute number of people living in rural areas would grow by roughly 15 million in the same period.

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a real underlying unevenness in what is achieved in service provision across different towns and urban areas. Municipalities with limited budgets tend to prioritise different things in different towns. In some places, this may be road improvements, in others public water points, in others piped water to private houses, and so on.

Table 4.22 Frequency of Mention of Urban Improvements

No. of Research Sites Stated Improvement

6 road improvements5 school construction

sewerage/sanitation improvements communal toilet installation

2-4 improvements in health facilities (posts, centres) market place construction mobile phone network (recent new coverage) more water supply posts land made available for private housing increasing private services (education, health) youth programmes: training & start-up business

1 airport (Arba Minch), anti-corruption measures, connecting roads to Addis (Jijiga), industrial zone, slum rehabilitation, streetlighting, technical colleges, business centres, cash-for-work projects

When it comes to urban problems, or things that make life in the PPA urban communities difficult, there is rather more consistency of findings across sites (Table 4.3). As for the rural PPA sites, respondents in urban community discussions were asked under a number of different headings about things that stopped their livelihoods improving or were causing their livelihoods to deteriorate over time. Altogether around 50 different “negative” factors are mentioned across the 14 urban PPA site reports. However, more than half of these are mentioned only once, so they are either rather trivial issues (“nuisances” rather than serious problems), or they are difficulties that are specific to the location of particular towns or to the PPA urban areas within towns. For example, ethnic biases in service provision are mentioned for Harar and Jijiga towns, but not elsewhere. Asayita town has problems to do with the switch of the Afar Region administrative capital to Semera town, and with the changing course of the Awash river. The district of Jimma town that was selected for research has a specific problem with hippos in a local river that has no equivalent elsewhere.

The most prevalent complaints across urban PPA sites concerned the rising cost-of-living (relative to earnings), the prevalence of petty crime and theft, the extent of unemployment, and sanitation problems. The latter is a serious urban infrastructure problem noted in 9 out of the 14 urban PPA sites. It comprises a set of interconnected concerns: the absence of a piped sewer system (sometimes referred to as “drainage”), the presence of open drains, insufficient communal or private toilet facilities, insufficient garbage removal, and overall insanitary conditions that facilitate the spread of diseases and cause high infant and child mortality.

Table 4.23 Frequency of Mention of Factors Worsening Urban Livelihoods

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No. of Research Sites Stated Problem or Cause

9 cost-of-living increases crime and theft sanitation and sewerage problems

7-8 unemployment spread of diseases (HIV/AIDS, malaria) potable water supply

3-6 inward migration inequality increasing remoteness from Addis Ababa access to agric commodities to sell poor health services poor urban feeder roads shortage of start-up capital use of river water tax increases

2 garbage accumulation homelessness illegal house construction power failures illegal petty traders loss of clothes market

Other urban area problems that are mentioned less frequently include inward migration (causing shortage of housing and overload of existing services); increasing inequality mentioned in several sites; and declining access to crops and other natural resource-based commodities for trading in urban areas (this occurs sometimes due to urban encroachment on previous agricultural land on the edge of cities, and sometimes due to the relocation of markets that cuts off the supply for people who previously had nearby access). Issues of limited access to credit for start-up capital arise under several different headings in reply to PPA questions.

Respondents in group discussions in the PPA urban sites were asked about their main occupations and sources of livelihood. Of course a great variety of different occupations were mentioned at every site, nevertheless the frequency with which particular occupations were mentioned across all sites provides a useful indication of how people are managing to get by in the less privileged districts of Ethiopian towns and cities. The data is summarised in Table 4.4 below. Petty trading is the most prevalent of all livelihood strategies in urban areas. This can take a wide variety of forms from farm produce to clothes to pots and pans to prepared food to soft drinks and alcoholic drinks (tela, araki) etc. Preparing and selling injera was mentioned often, as also was firewood selling and drinks selling, and are listed separately in the table in addition to the general description of petty trading.

Table 4.24 Frequency of Mention of Main Occupations Across Urban Sites

No of Majority Occupations Mentioned

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Research Sites by Respondents14 petty trading12 labour, daily & casual6-9 injera selling

civil servants drink selling firewood selling

3-5 private business construction work domestic service metal workers house rental sex workers

1-2 factory work, carpenters, drivers, horticulture, child labour, selling milk, second hand clothes selling, spinning and weaving, agriculture

Several aspects of petty trading are worth noting. One is that men and women can do this equally in urban areas, and indeed women often predominate in certain branches, for example injera selling. Secondly, particular types of trade (e.g. firewood) are dependent on sources of supply from the countryside, and may have environmental effects in rural areas that are a policy issue (deforestation). Third, petty trading is a fairly insecure livelihood platform since ease of entry by new traders means that margins tend to be pushed to the minimum level (and many respondents had much to say about this). Fourth, petty trading requires credit in order to acquire inventory, or to purchase basic equipment, and the ease of access to this at the micro level is a policy area which is being addressed successfully in some towns and not in others.

After petty trading (and closely related activities), the chief occupations in urban areas are daily labour (typically unskilled casual labour hired for particular purposes on a daily basis), junior salaried employment (clerks etc. often for the government), construction industry in towns where buildings are going up and roads are being upgraded, domestic service (housemaid, cleaner, cook), specialised labour (metal workers and carpenters were mentioned), and “sex work” (prostitution). An important source of income for people who own moderately well-constructed houses is letting rooms, and indeed it was apparent from the urban PPA reports that this is a more significant source of income to many people than is indicated by its frequency of mention in Table 4.4.

It is clear that living in urban areas can make a big difference to women’s lives. This does not mean that all social norms of gender roles disappear (see Box 4.1), but it becomes more acceptable for women to work, and for women and men to have separate control over the money they generate from working. In all sites, women were working as well as men, although men viewed this as a necessity rather than an acceptable social practice in some places (for example in Asayita: “women working is a new phenomenon, brought about by hardship” (PPA Report No.6). Women in 5 sites stated that their overall status had improved in recent years. Nevertheless, women widely continue to defer to men in decisions over activities and money, and it is evident from the urban reports that social change in this area is uneven and gradual in all towns. The ability of women to achieve more independent decision-

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making can be quickly dismissed by men: “a house that has been constructed by a woman does not always have a gate” (PPA Report No.4, p.46).

Box 4.12 Social Norms for Women’s Behaviour in an Urban Area

The following were stated in a gender discussion group in the Mekele town research site as examples of social norms concerning things that women are not supposed to do:

“Women cannot lend property that belongs to husbands, Women cannot lend money that husbands knows very well, Women cannot sell property which belongs to husbands; Women cannot buy animal for slaughter when the husbands are away; Women cannot eat particular part of chicken and so on.”

Source: PPA Site Report No.4, Mekele Town, p.45

In 10 out of the 14 urban sites (70 per cent), respondents in gender discussion groups stated that women undertook all domestic chores. Only in 3 sites was any suggestion made that men were beginning to share such chores. In terms of occupations, women mainly engage in the various types of petty trade discussed earlier, or work as domestic servants in the houses of better off citizens. In 10 sites they described their main constraint as lack of credit to invest in their business, and in 5 sites they emphasized the importance of being given training in business skills as a way to improving their livelihoods. These are policy issues that are taken up again in the final section of this report.

4.3 Well-being Ranking and Livelihood Trajectories in Urban EthiopiaWell-being ranking in the urban PPA research sites differed in important ways from the parallel exercise in rural sites. In urban enumeration areas, it was not possible to take a random sample from the household list and expect a small group of key informants to place individual households into different well-being categories.14 For this reason, the approach taken in urban sites was to ask key informants to help select 5 households for each of 3 pre-assigned well-being groups – better-off, middle and worse-off – and then to find out from each group of households themselves the well-being characteristics that they represent (for example, in quality of housing etc.). In this way, a total of 210 households were included in the urban well-being ranking, comprising 15 households in each of 14 sites and 5 households in each group per site.

This approach means that well-being ranking in urban areas does not yield information on the share of total households in the different urban sites that could be categorised as poor, middle or better-off. As already stated, in general the poor (and poor living conditions) predominated in the selected urban sites because they were purposively chosen to investigate those types of urban area. Therefore in the discussion that follows on the different well-being groups, it should be kept in mind that the middle and better-off households were in the minority in the urban areas that were included in the PPA research.14 Key informants would tend to only have knowledge of the well-being status of immediate

neighbours and others in the same street.

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The criteria determining relative poverty and wealth in urban Ethiopia differs considerably from the rural well-being criteria (set out earlier in Table 3.7). Two rather different sets of criteria prevail. The first set comprises the types of job or occupation in which household members are engaged. The second set comprises household assets which urban households might be expected to possess including house quality, access to public services, and consumer durables. For each well-being category around 15 different job types were mentioned across the study sites, although some of these can be combined into categories; for example ownership of hotels, shops, bars and grain mills can be regarded as examples of “small business”, likewise many different types of buying and selling can be collected together in the category of “trading”.

In general, the better-off in urban areas are characterised by owning small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), specialist trading (coffee, chat, contraband), government or NGO salaries, and remittances from abroad. The middle well-being group may be petty traders, junior civil servants, daily wage earners in construction, factories or other semi-skilled activity, drivers, engage in specialised trading (clothing, dairy products, retail), and renting out rooms. The worse-off group also engage in daily labour (which is more likely to be casual and unskilled), prepare and sell injera, sell firewood, and do domestic work, as well as being laid off or unemployed, and renting out rooms. Relevant data on the frequency of mention of these different occupational categories are provided in Table 4.5.

When it comes to asset status, substantial differences are found between the well-being groups. These differences centre on housing quality, access to services, level of education achieved, and ownership of consumer electronic goods such as radio, television and video (see Table 4.6). There are of course overlaps between groups with respect to some of these criteria. For example, some poor people may have low housing quality yet have good access to the main services via shared or communal provision. Likewise, people in the middle well-being group can have well-being characteristics that are the same as the poor, or others that are the same as the better off. Therefore these categories provide a broad picture of the different conditions under which people live in urban areas, and there are not sharp definitions separating them.

Table 4.25 Frequency of Mention of Different Occupations, by Well-Being Group

Poor or Worse-Off Middle Better-Offdomestic work (7) petty trade (10) own shops (9)daily labour (6) junior civil servant (8) own bars (7)injera selling (6) retail trade (5) own hotels (7)firewood sales (6) wage labour (4) own grain mills (6)petty trading (3) second-hand clothes (3) govt or NGO salary (5)retrenched workers (3) pension (2) remittances (5)

Note: figures in parentheses are number of urban sites (out of 14) in which this occupation was mentioned for that well-being group.

Table 4.26 Asset Status and Service Access in Urban Areas, by Well-Being Group

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Asset or Service Category Poor Middle Better-Off

Housing wall: mud (9)floor: mud (9)

wall: mud (most)floor: cement (8), mud (4)

wall: stone or block (13)floor: cement (13)

Water supply communal (8) share (7), communal (5) private (14)

Toilet none (5), communal (5)

share (5),private (4) private (14)

Electricity share (10) private (4 ), share (8) private (14)

Telecom none (10), public (3)

landline (5),none (4) landline (12)

Mobile none (14) few own some own (8)Transport walk (13) bus, walk taxi, car, bicycle

Education illiterate (4), up to G4 (5) G4-G12 (10) up to G8 (5),

up to G12 (4)

Health care kebele certificate public services public & private services

Consumer Goods radio (6), none (6) TV (6), radio (7) TV/video (14)

Note: figures in parentheses are number of urban sites (out of 14) in which this characteristic was mentioned.

The housing of the poor is generally stated as being of very low quality, either a poor quality mud and thatch hut, or a shack comprising corrugated iron, plastic and other materials. In all cases the floor would be earth. For the poor, water access typically involves using public water points (bono); also mentioned are bore holes, wells and rivers (often dirty and polluted). Toilet facilities for the poor are typically communal, but in some cities they do not have any toilet facilities at all, and if they live on the edge of cities, they use a bucket or just go in the bush. Sanitation is a widespread problem in poor urban areas, with inadequate main sewerage, open drains, and uncleared garbage prevalent. The poor have no private access to electricity but often “share” the supply installed to other houses, paying a “bulb rate” for the service (at the time of the PPA this bulb rate varied between xx-xx birr). The poor do not have either fixed or mobile telephony, they mainly walk to work, they may be illiterate or have education up to grade 4, they will depend on getting a kebele certificate for access to public health services, and they may own a radio.

For middle households, cement floors and corrugated iron roofs characterise their housing quality in many sites; but mud walls are typical using a variety of different construction methods. Water supply is usually communal (bono) or shared, including buying water by the litre from someone with piped delivery. Toilet access is communal or shared, with some having private toilets. Electricity is usually shared. Some middle households have landline telephones and a few have mobiles; people walk or take the bus to work; education can be up to grades 4 to 12; health care relies on public health posts and centres; and most middle households would own a radio, with some owning a television.

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The better-off are defined by having significantly higher housing quality than others. In particular cement floors and stone, brick or block walls are the norm for this group. The better-off typically have piped water, electricity supply to their own meter, private toilet, and landline telephone. Many of them own mobile phones. They travel to work by bicycle, car or taxi; they are educated up to between grade 4 and 12; they may be able to afford to go to private health clinics; and most of them own a television and video recorder.

In urban areas of the type investigated in the PPA there are close links between people of different well-being groups in access and provision of services. Those who can afford to pay for piped water, for example, often sell water to other households; and the same applies to those with an electricity meter. Most households irrespective of their relative poverty or wealth depend on public education and health facilities (these are not the type of urban areas where being “better-off” means that you could afford private education and health, except in rare instances). This also means that all households confront the same sets of problems when the urban infrastructure is incomplete or deteriorating such as with lack of sewerage, open drains, potholed roads and so on.

Participants in the urban well-being ranking exercises were asked to identify individual households that had moved upwards or downwards between well-being groups during the preceding five years. In addition, respondents were asked for the reasons for these upward or downward movements. Of the 195 households in 13 sites that completed this part of the PPA, only 25 households (13 per cent) were identified as “upward moving”, while 47 households (24 per cent) had moved downwards, and 123 households (63 per cent) had stayed in the same well-being category. This suggests a lack of much social mobility in deprived urban areas in Ethiopia during the period preceding the study, no doubt also reflecting broader economic trends such as the sectoral composition of economic growth in the same period. There were, of course, variations between towns and cities in the extent of such movements. Upward movements seemed to occur mainly in Mekele, Jimma and Awassa towns; while downward movements occurred mainly in Addis (Kolfie Keraniyo), Harar, Dire Dawa, Nazret and Dessie.

Altogether about 16 distinct reasons were put forward by household respondents as to why they had been able to move upwards from their previous well-being position (see Table 4.7). Some of these only occur once in what is really quite a small sample; for example, wife getting a job, beneficial impact of equib, gaining a permanent job, renting out room etc. The most prevalent reasons were remittances from abroad, growth of own business, children getting salaried jobs, salary rise and success at trading. While these individual reasons do not seem to reveal much of a pattern, the urban PPA reports provide widespread evidence that access to credit on manageable repayment terms underpins many success stories of upward economic mobility in urban areas. Business start-up, business growth, and success at trading are all closely tied to access to funds for investment and inventory.

Table 4.27 Frequency of Reasons for Upward Movements

No. of Research Sites

Reasons for Upward Movements(grouped when similar to each other)

5 remittances from abroad (incl. Djibouti)4 growth of own business3 children got salaried jobs

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success at trading2 salary rise at work1 diversified activities; beneficial impact of equib; deploying

family labour wisely; got permanent job; rented out room; reduction in family size; started tailoring; wife got credit; wife got job

For downward movements in people’s livelihood fortunes, about 30 different reasons were cited across the 14 different urban research cites, although around half of these were minority reasons that were only mentioned in one or two places. By far the most important reasons for downward trajectories in urban sites were illness (especially of the household head), family size increases, the decline in contraband trading that had occurred over the previous five years, asset sales to secure enough food, divorce, and increased competition in trading activities (caused by new entrants into petty trading). Also important were death of the household head, medical expenses, rising living costs, and retrenchment or unemployment from previous full-time work (Table 4.8).

There are more similarities for downward movements between urban and rural sites, than there are for upward movements. This is because illness, death and divorce set up similar sequences of downward spiral irrespective of where people live. Similar mechanisms also apply: a crisis event such as illness or death causes assets to be depleted in order to meet medical costs in the case of illness or due to the way assets are divided in the cases of death or divorce. With depleted assets, it becomes more difficult for people to engage in trade or business since they lack the cash to invest in inventory, and they may have lost their collateral for obtaining loans. Again, as in rural areas, downward trajectories are sometimes associated with particular vulnerable groups such as the elderly (more prone to illness and medical costs) and the disabled (unable to secure urban jobs).

Table 4.28 Frequency of Reasons for Downward Movements

No. of Research Sites

Reasons for Downward Movements(grouped when similar to each other)

10 illness, especially of household head6 increase in family size5 decline in contraband trading4 asset sales to secure enough food

divorce increased competition in trading

3 death of household head medical expenses retrenchment from previous employment rising living costs unemployed household head

1-2 fines for contraband trading; failed loan recovery; business failure; clan conflict; coffee price fall; depletion of fishery (Arba Minch); disability; drought; drug abuse; wedding expenditures; land tax increase; loan repayments; lost market place; old age; theft; changed course of Awash river

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(Asayita); vehicle accident

4.4 Vulnerable GroupsThe PPA research teams were asked to each focus on a particular vulnerable group at each urban research site, and to interview members of that group in order to find out about their lives and coping strategies. The different vulnerable groups that were selected across the 14 urban research sites were youths, the disabled, the elderly, squatters and HIV/AIDS victims. The number of case-studies for each of these groups chosen for detailed work varied across the urban research sites as shown in Table 4.9 below.

Table 4.29 Distribution of Vulnerable Groups across Urban Study Sites

Vulnerable Group Urban Site Where InvestigatedUrban Youth Mekele, Dessie, Bahir Dar, Asosa, HararDisabled Asayita, Jimma, Arba MinchElderly Jijiga, Addis Ababa (Kolfie Keraniyo)Squatters Dire Dawa, Addis Ababa (Arada)HIV/AIDS Victims Nazret

As was the case in rural areas, there are patterns that apply across all vulnerable groups in urban areas, as well as problems that are specific to each group individually. Vulnerability in urban areas takes the form of being almost continuously on the edge of insufficient food for daily maintenance, and often falling below that line. It also often involves crowded and insanitary living conditions in poor quality housing (rents can be as low as 0.25 birr a night), squatting in shacks made of plastic and scraps of wood, and exposure to personal danger (assault etc.). The factors that predispose people to vulnerability in urban areas differ from those in rural areas where lack of land and livestock are the chief causative factors. In urban areas, it is lack of education and skills, and inability to start-up self employment enterprises due to lack of savings or credit.

The urban vulnerable survive by petty trading and working for incredibly low wages or no cash wage at all (but they may obtain a basic food ration at the place of work). Daily wage rates (or net returns to petty trading) as low as 2-3 birr a day are mentioned in the urban PPA reports, although 5-6 birr a day are achieved towards the upper end of the earnings range that is typical for these vulnerable groups. Urban vulnerable groups have various strategies for dealing with their precarious situation, and the main ones mentioned in the PPA urban site reports are as follows:

gifts from friends or relatives borrowing money or food from relatives or neighbours begging for money or food sleeping to avoid hunger eating roasted grain (qollo) drinking barley flour and water (besso) collecting crumbs from bars and cafes eating injera made of sorghum

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killing appetite by sipping coffee skipping meals (down to one meal a day) selling coffee husks petty trading (many different items) collecting firewood for sale selling personal assets

It is noticeable that many of these coping devices apply equally in rural as in urban areas (e.g. skipping meals, eating inferior foods, drinking coffee to stop hunger pangs, selling personal assets), while others differ (extent of petty trading and begging as strategies in urban areas). In some towns (for example, Asayita), the urban vulnerable are dependent on food aid or food-for-work, just as are the rural vulnerable in many places. Youth unemployment is a big cause of overall vulnerability in urban areas, and no doubt this also contributes to the rise of theft and crime in towns mentioned in several urban PPA site reports.

The key policy initiatives required to reduce vulnerability in towns are to do with education, skills and credit provision. In several towns, NGOs in particular have had considerable success with particular groups (youths, women) in setting up training schemes in particular skills and linking this to credit provision once the training is completed. This potentially enables people to set up as metal workers, carpenters, builders, tailors etc. with some initial skills appropriate to the job rather than no skills at all. Simple book keeping skills are also appropriate to a wide variety of self-employment activities. Many of the unemployed youth stated that they wanted to take their education further, but no opportunities to do so existed, indicating that continuing education in urban areas, especially in vocational subjects, may require higher priority in educational spending in the future.

4.5 Migration and MobilityAs already noted in the context of the rural PPA sites, a central theme of the Ethiopia PPA was to gain a better understanding of human mobility in Ethiopia including temporary or permanent rural-to-urban migration. For this reason, 10 households were selected at each urban study site in order to obtain more accurate impressions of the reasons individuals or families had moved to the urban area, as well as other information about their status and behaviour as migrants. Altogether, 138 households across the 14 PPA were interviewed on this topic, and an example of the type of information about migration available from these case-studies is provided in Table 4.10.

Table 4.30 Case-Study of a Migrant to Mekele Town

Basic Data Information on RespondentReason for selection Female household head (vulnerable)Household size 4 in total (3 children under 18-years)

Questions Asked Answers Provided by the RespondentWhen did you move? The month of Yekatit 1993How long ago? 4 years and 10 monthsWho decided to move? It was my own decisionWhy did you move? I ran away to escape from my own parents and to

seek better employment opportunities. From where? From a place called Haik in North Wollo, Amhara

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RegionDo you send money home?

No, because I work in a restaurant and the income I earn is not sufficient even to support and sustain my own family here in Mekele.

Do you return home regularly?

No, I have never gone back since I came to Mekele.

Source: PPA Site Report No.4, Mekele Town, p.33

Individuals or families move to urban areas for many different reasons, or combinations of reasons. These are rarely simple decisions based on a single motivation such as hearing that there are wage jobs in a particular city. They are more likely to be complex decisions in which a combination of factors such as lack of access to land or family conflict in their home village provide the “push” reasons to migrate, and the prospects of finding an urban job provides the “pull” reason. Some reasons appear straightforward but are actually quite complicated in social and economic terms. For example, an individual may be sent from a rural to urban area to “stay” with a relative. In fact, underlying this movement, there may be a food security problem at home in the rural area that is alleviated by reducing the number of people in the household, and the urban relative gains by getting domestic help in exchange for providing shelter and meals.

When looking at stated causes as provided by respondents in the PPA, the search for work comes up as the most frequent single reason cited, although as suggested above this is rarely the only motivation for making the move. Other prevalent reasons are education, family conflict, and applying successfully for a job (including job transfers where someone is moved from a small rural town to a larger urban area). Less common reasons include starting up business, illness or death in the home family, landlessness back in the village, accompanying husband, divorce, and entry into housemaid jobs. Altogether about 25 different reasons are put forward by PPA respondents, some of which are individual (for example, being stood-down from the army), but most of which involve family interactions or events that place the individual in a weak position for making a living in rural areas (divorce, loss of land access, death of a spouse and so on).

It follows from these reasons, that migrants into towns are overwhelmingly young people when they first arrive in urban areas. It is young people who move for education, or to stay with relatives, or due to adverse family events back home in the village. Young people may also be attracted by the “lure” of the town (or, as stated by one respondent, “being impressed by a visitor from the town”). As noted in the previous section, young people can constitute a substantial proportion of vulnerable people overall in urban areas since they often lack assets and skills, and are unable to gain entry to business or salaried employment.

Respondents were asked whether they remitted money or goods home to their relatives in rural areas. Only 45 out of the 138 respondents (33 per cent) replied in the affirmative to this question, the majority stating quite clearly that they did not do well enough themselves to be able to do this, or that they had lost contact with their rural families altogether after living in urban areas for some years. In some cases, family members had also moved to town to join the first person that went there. For those respondents that did remit, the typical level of such remittances would be around 20-60 birr a year, taken back home on an annual visit at the time of one of the festivities. However, a few respondents did rather better than this, managing up

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to 500 birr a year, or, saving 1000 or 2000 birr a year to take home (4 cases). Some migrants did not remit money, but took gifts of clothing and shoes in their visits home.

The urban PPA reports support the rural reports in indicating that mobility and migration are relatively low key activities in Ethiopia compared to the experience in many other countries, where a great deal more coming-and-going between rural and urban areas occurs on a routine basis. The reasons for much of the migration that does occur are gradual and unthreatening to social harmony, as in education, visiting relatives, coming to be a housemaid etc. Given the upheavals in the Ethiopian countryside of the past two or three decades (including the notorious droughts) it is surprising that a lot more migration has not taken place. The other side of this low key and gradual migration is its indication of relatively subdued economic dynamism, since rapidly changing and growing economies tend to create a lot more mobility than slowly changing economies. It is unfortunately true that rapid economic and social change brings in its wake urban social ills (slums, crime, squalor etc) that subsequently need to be dealt with by public policy; however, this is a trade-off that needs to be taken on board if Ethiopia is to move forwards towards higher standards of living in the future.

4.6 Institutions and Quality of ServicesAs in rural PPA sites, the urban PPA research sought to identify the most important institutions in people’s lives in towns and cities. The same methods and the same caveats apply to this component of the research in urban areas as in rural areas (Section 3.6 above) and for this reason the points made there are not repeated in detail here. However, the reader should bear in mind the two key points; first, that the effectiveness of kebele government can be overstated if members of the kebele administration happen to be nearby or present in the institutional discussion; and, second, that “importance” and “effectiveness” tend to get confused in institutional ranking, with how important people tend to regard an institution or service tending to dominate over how effective that institution is in discharging its functions. Hence a high ranking of an institution by respondents is no guarantee that the institution is working well at what it is supposed to do.

Overall, about 40 different “institutions” were identified as being important in ordinary citizens’ lives or livelihoods across the 14 urban research sites. Around a quarter of these were only mentioned at one site, for example, the railway in Dire Dawa, and BoFED (presumably because the researchers had a BoFED officer with them) in Mekele. Another quarter were mentioned in two sites and these included private health clinics and pharmacies, district courts, political parties, women’s association and youth association (both much more popular in rural than in urban areas). When these low frequency of mention institutions were excluded from the analysis, 22 institutions were left to examine for their priority ordering by respondents in group discussions.

The ranking of these 22 institutions was looked at in four different ways, as in the rural institutions analysis, in order to examine different facets of their prioritization by respondents, and also to test the strength of the findings. These four ways are summarised and compared in Table 4.11 below, and they comprise:

(5) simple count of the number of times, across 14 urban sites, that an institution was included in the ranking exercise by respondents;

(6) count of the number of times that an institution was ranked 1st, 2nd, or 3rd across the 14 urban sites;

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(7) count of the number of times that an institution was ranked between 1st and 5th across the 14 urban sites;

(8) average rank for that institution across the number of sites for which it was included in the ranking

As in the rural exercise, the final one of these used a statistical formula to calculate an average rank while avoiding the influence of isolated large numbers on the average (see the footnote to Table 4.11). The significance of institutions to urban citizens is captured in part simply by counting the number of times an institution is included in the ranking across the 14 sites, and in part by the actual rank ordering that is given to different institutions. As shown in Table 4.11 (first column), the most frequently mentioned institutions were, in descending order, the health post or health centre, various NGOs (national and foreign), primary school, the kebele administration, the church or mosque, idir, the police, water supply, electricity supply, and telecoms (ETCO). In this ordering, the Family Guidance Association (FGA) which helps families in respect of reproductive health and related matters comes out last, being mentioned in only 3 of the urban sites and possibly being non-existent in most of the others.

When the ranking given by respondents to these institutions is taken into account (the next three columns in Table 4.11) some institutions change position quite sharply. This is true of the FGA, just mentioned, which is ranked very highly for the few places where it is mentioned at all. In fact it comes out highest in the average rating, but this is across only 3

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Table 4.31 Comparison of Alternative Rankings of Institutions in Urban Ethiopia (14 PPA Sites)

Frequency Included in Ranking Frequency Rated in Top 3 Frequency Rated in Top 5 Average Rating Across Sites

Rank Institution Count Rank Institution Count Rank Institution Count Rank Institution Index1 health post 14 1 school 7 1 school 11 1 FGA 1.62 NGOs 14 2 kebele 5 2 kebele 6 2 school 3.53 school 14 3 health post 4 3 health post 6 3 water 5.14 kebele 13 4 NGOs 3 4 water 5 4 electricity 5.55 church 11 5 idir 3 5 church 5 5 health post 5.66 idir 11 6 police 3 6 NGOs 4 6 kebele 5.97 police 9 7 water 3 7 police 4 7 high school 5.98 water 9 8 FGA 3 8 idir 3 8 banks 6.29 electricity 8 9 electricity 2 9 FGA 3 9 police 6.410 ETCO 7 10 banks 2 10 electricity 3 10 ETCO 6.511 peace 7 11 church 1 11 ETCO 3 11 HIV/AIDS 6.912 banks 6 12 ETCO 1 12 banks 2 12 idir 7.013 hospital 6 13 peace 1 13 hospital 2 13 hospital 7.214 kindergarten 5 14 HIV/AIDS 1 14 high school 2 14 NGOs 8.015 HIV/AIDS 4 15 credit inst 1 15 peace 1 15 church 8.416 keb justice 4 16 hospital 0 16 HIV/AIDS 1 16 peace 8.717 municipality 4 17 kindergarten 0 17 credit inst 1 17 kindergarten 8.918 credit inst 4 18 keb justice 0 18 keb justice 1 18 credit inst 10.319 high school 4 19 municipality 0 19 factories 1 19 keb justice 10.420 factories 4 20 high school 0 20 kindergarten 0 20 factories 11.521 equibs 3 21 factories 0 21 municipality 0 21 equibs 12.022 FGA 3 22 equibs 0 22 equibs 0 22 municipality 15.3

Source: Community reports for 14 urban PPA sites* Average rank (R) calculated according to the formula R = (∑√r/n)2 , where r = rank number given at each site, and n the number of sites

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sites. Clearly, a sense of the true importance of different institutions for urban citizens is provided by their relative stability across these different measures. Thus schools, the kebele, health, water and electricity provision, the police, and idir are the most consistent in this regard, with banks and telecoms not far behind.

Interestingly, municipalities receive relatively few mentions in urban rankings (4 sites) and when they are mentioned they are given low rankings (they come last in the average rating up to 22 institutions). This could be interpreted as being indicative of the success of devolution of powers to the kebele level, bringing democratic accountability closer to urban citizens. On the other hand, this lack of mention and low prioritisation also means that citizens in the more deprived areas of cities see the municipality as a distant institution that has very little to do with improving their lives. This is not a desirable position for municipalities to be in. Towns and cities need high profile municipal authorities that are seen to be accomplishing changes in the urban environment that improve the lives of ordinary citizens, especially those in deprived areas. It is this type of forward looking city administration that attracts inward capital from domestic and foreign investors.

Some interesting comparisons with rural institutional preferences can be made on the basis of this data. The significance attached to schooling, health, the kebele, idir and NGOs carries across both rural and urban areas. However, in rural areas agricultural extension, religion (church and mosque), peace committees (conflict resolution), credit institutes (DECSI, ACSI etc.), and labour exchange institutions (debo) feature strongly in the top 10-12 rankings and they do not do so in urban areas. In urban areas these are replaced by water, electricity and telecoms services, and by the police and banks. These comparisons are summarised in Table 4.12 below.

Table 4.32 Comparison of Top Ranked Institutions between Rural and Urban PPA Sites

Rural Research Sites Urban Research Sites

The Same

school provision health services kebele administration idir NGOs (national and foreign)

Different

agricultural extension religion (church & mosque) peace committees (conflict

resolution) credit institutes labour sharing (debo)

water supply electricity supply telecoms services police force banks (private & govt.)

The existence and prioritization of urban services is not necessarily indicative of the quality of delivery of those services. The PPA research asked respondents to provide information on how well certain institutions worked, as well as the listing and ranking already described. For schooling, 11 of the 14 urban PPA sites had a primary school within or adjacent to the EA, and the other 3 sites had access within 2-3 km distance. In 12 cases the schools covered grades 1-8, while one school went up to grade 7 and one up to grade 10. About half the urban sites also had high schools on site or within 15-20 minutes walk.

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Views about the quality of schools were more positive than was the case for rural provision.15

About half the urban sites reported schools where classrooms, textbook provision, and teacher availability were considered satisfactory by respondents. Nevertheless, those that reported class sizes indicated teacher:pupil ratios in the range of 1:60 to 1:80 which are not very different from rural figures. Respondents provided fragmentary information on schooling costs, including registration fees, annual development charges, and uniforms that varied widely across different cities (for example, 10-30 birr per year for registration fees). However, this data was not systematic enough to discuss averages and variations properly.

Generally, urban citizens have more immediate access to a range of health services than do rural citizens. This is because some combination of health post, health centre, private clinic or public hospital is likely to be accessible to all urban residents, especially in medium-sized towns where distances between urban areas are not very great. The quality of care across health institutions seems quite variable, however, with limited opening hours or limited drugs being mentioned in several different places. Awassa can be singled out as a regional capital that does not have a hospital, and was unique amongst the 14 urban study sites in this respect. The poor seemed to be able to get free (or nearly free) healthcare by application to the kebele for a certificate, although how widespread is this scheme was not possible to assess from the partial information provided in some of the PPA urban reports. Costs were variously reported as between 1 and 5 birr a card, with each card permitting a certain number of visits.

The urban PPA reports contain a wide variety of comments on the provision of other services such as potable water, toilets, sewerage (main drains), electricity and so on. There have been significant improvements in water supply in many towns, mainly in the form of additional public water posts (bono), but also in piped water in some places. Likewise communal toilet provision has improved people’s livelihoods considerably in some of the PPA urban sites. Cost from public water tankers was reported as 10 birr per 20 litres, which is considerably lower than private water sales cited in one report as 50 birr per 20 litres. Harar city has an acute water problem that evidently needs urgent attention, and residents at the Jimma site depended on a polluted river for their water supplies. Residents in the Arba Minch site appeared to have the town rubbish tip on the edge of their living area. In some cities, primarily Harar and Jijiga, ethnic and clan preferences in the provision of services and the treatment of citizens was widely reported by PPA respondents.

Considerable variation in service provision and quality in different cities shows that much remains to be done in setting minimum standards of provision that are affordable and could be widely applied across all towns above a certain size. One of the reasons for the popularity of NGOs in Ethiopian towns and cities is that it is often NGOs, and not city governments, that achieve breakthroughs in the minimum provision of water or toilets to lower income areas of cities. While the help of NGOs is obviously to be welcomed in the task of providing better quality services for the urban poor, in the long run there is no substitute for improved performance of the municipal governments in this regard, and especially to ensure more evenness of provision across different towns.

15 This is also true of equivalent qualitative findings for the same rural and urban EAs as the PPA in the 2004 WMS.

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4.7 Governance and EmpowermentAs for rural areas (see Section 3.7 above) three main aspects of governance were investigated in PPA urban sites. These were people’s sense of ‘empowerment’ i.e. whether they felt that they were able to express their views on matters affecting their lives, and to get adequate responses from public officials; the exercise of power and authority and how restrictive this is on people’s options; and, finally, the taxation regime that applies to urban citizens.

There was widespread agreement across urban communities that ordinary citizens were nowadays more able to express their views and opinions freely than was the case five or ten years ago. Respondents at 10 out of the 14 sites (71 per cent) reported that this was so, and this closely parallels the findings for rural sites reported earlier. Nevertheless respondents at 3 sites expressed the fear that officials would take revenge upon them if they complained too freely. Interestingly, both Addis Ababa sites were amongst the 4 places where respondents did not agree that freedom of expression had improved (the others were Jijiga and Arba Minch). Eleven sites (79 per cent) reported that people’s awareness of their rights as citizens had improved in recent times. However, this finding is offset by wide agreement that officials rarely, if ever, inform people about their rights. As stated by a group of respondents in the Mekele research site: “[Officials] come to the community only when they want to communicate to people their own political aims.” (Mekele PPA report, p.26).

As noted for the rural sites, awareness of rights and ability to express views is one side of a two-sided process that requires responsiveness by local officials to opinions and complaints. Here, 10 of the 14 sites said that responses to complaints were poor or inadequate (or ignored altogether), while respondents at only 3 sites reported that matters were improving in this respect. The majority view is summed by a respondent in Dire Dawa: “even a tied dog could be heard barking” (PPA Report No.42). There were mixed views on justice and law in the urban communities, with 7 sites (50 per cent) saying that improvements had occurred and 6 sites stating the opposite. This is of course quite a complicated area in which to elicit qualitative information since there are several different tiers of justice in Ethiopian towns (including kebele resolution of minor issues, as well as the formal justice system).

More political plurality was evident in urban areas than in rural areas, with respondents reporting more than one (and up to 6) different political parties in 5 of the sites, while the remaining 9 sites (64 per cent) had no political choice. The places with multiple political parties included Harar (4 parties), Dire Dawa (6 parties reported), Jijiga (2 parties), Nazret (3 parties), and Dessie (2 parties). Three of these places are clustered and represent particular social and political histories, as well as degrees of autonomy from national politics (Harar, Dire Dawa and Jijiga). These are also places where ethnic and clan rivalries tend to be more overtly displayed than in other parts of Ethiopia.

The summary view of empowerment in urban Ethiopia is closely similar to the equivalent findings in rural areas (Section 3.7 above). There are positive indications that people have greater freedom of expression than in the past, and have more awareness of their basic human rights, but officials tend to stand aloof from ordinary citizens and to see their role more in terms of authority and issuing instructions than in terms of consultation and problem solving.

Scattered information in the urban PPA reports show that social control is quite strong in urban areas, as it is in rural areas in Ethiopia. Resident registration with the kebele is compulsory, and movement out of the kebele to go elsewhere requires an official leaving letter. How uniformly these requirements are pursued in towns, and the penalties for failure to

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comply with them are not clear from information reported by respondents. The purpose of these devices perhaps needs considering as Ethiopia enters a period, hopefully, of more rapid social and economic change and more mobility. If registrations and permits have the purpose of enabling officials to deliver services better to people living in their administrative areas, then they are perhaps justified, but if such devices exist in order to prevent people from exercising choices, or to make mobility more difficult then they would need to be reviewed.

The urban PPA reports provide only fragmentary information on taxes and service fees paid by urban citizens. As for rural areas, taxation does not seem much of an issue for ordinary citizens, so one can assume that the tax burden is not too onerous in the various ways that it is applied. It is apparent that urban citizens pay property taxes, that operate in differing ways in different places (land tax, earth tax, roof and wall tax etc.). In those places with proper sewerage systems households pay a sanitation fee. Households with private connections to piped water, electricity and landline telephone obviously pay basic and use charges for those services, as they would anywhere. The same range of market place taxes apply in urban as well as rural areas where agricultural produce is traded in formal market places. In addition, donkey embarkation and horse cart taxes were mentioned in some places.

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Chapter 5 Policy Implications for Future Poverty Reduction

The PPA shows that social and economic change is occurring in Ethiopia, but at quite a leisurely pace, and hedged about with a considerable amount of social and administrative unwillingness to allow greater social and economic diversity, and more spatial mobility across the country. Rapid enough economic change of the type that will deliver rising living standards will require more responsiveness and flexibility than this. Freedom of action for economic purposes should not be confused with political dissent (as contemporary China illustrates rather well). Above anything else, economic change needs government that works with, rather than against, people’s energy and enthusiasm to construct better lives for themselves and their families.

The PPA brings to the forefront some important policy challenges that Ethiopia is likely to confront as the government seeks to move forward with its poverty reduction agenda in the future. These challenges can be grouped as follows:

o land shortageo low mobility and low non-farm dynamism in rural areaso gender equality and future optionso livestock disease and veterinary serviceso rural-urban transitions and urban economic growth

With respect to the first of these, the PPA reveals that land shortage is regarded by ordinary rural citizens as the most critical factor amongst all the constraints that they face. This shortage is manifested by land sharing, declining farm sizes, youth landlessness, shrinking common land, and lack of grazing. Nor is this a static situation which left to its own devices will correct itself in the long term. On the contrary, continued rural population growth combined with slow rural-urban transition, will ensure that the land squeeze becomes ever tighter with the passage of time. The present policy response to this – moving relatively small numbers of people from land scarce to land not-so-scarce areas – is a short term palliative that fails to address the severity of the underlying problem. In the end government will need to confront this issue seriously and adapt poverty reduction strategies towards a more rapid rural-urban transition in Ethiopia.

The second challenge is closely related to the first. The PPA demonstrates that a combination of factors results in a situation that can be described in shorthand as endorsing rural citizens to remain “trapped in agriculture”. This is due to social and official disapproval of mobility and migration, widespread perceptions on the part of ordinary people that loss of land entitlement will follow from migration or engagement in non-farm activities (these perceptions arise from history and local interpretation rather than the letter of contemporary law, but are no less strong for that), the related weak emergence of non-farm options, and a general lack of exchange, mobility, and economic energy in rural areas. Some aspects of this state of affairs are already being tackled by government, although the processes involved could be given greater urgency. For example, the certification of land so that the certificate holder has an inalienable right to the land, including passing it on to his or her children and renting it out, would overcome many of the real and perceived land tenure blockages to greater rural mobility.

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The third challenge concerns the relatively slow pace in rural areas of achieving equality of opportunity and social status for women. Whereas in urban areas, quite rapid social change is taking place enabling women to engage in labour markets, retain financial resources for themselves, and move around more freely, in rural areas women’s freedom of action remains considerably circumscribed. Important gains in the highland regions have been achieved through establishing equality in ownership rights over land. However, social barriers to women’s engagement in agricultural tasks, trading and movement away from the village mean that women’s options are often exceptionally limited, and this in turn means that female headed households are often amongst the poorest and most vulnerable social groups in the rural community. Both in rural and in urban areas, expansion of training for skills acquisition and credit opportunities for women would seem to offer excellent prospects for high returns in terms of income generation and activity growth, relative to the public expenditure outlay involved.

The PPA reveals the prevalence of livestock disease, the preventability of many routine diseases, and the lack of an effective veterinary policy that is understood clearly by livestock keepers across the country. Public veterinary services, from PPA reporting, seem to be patchy, uneven, and inadequately oriented to responding quickly to disease outbreaks. If there is a fundamental public funding constraint here that cannot be overcome then other, more innovatory, ways of dealing with veterinary problems need to be considered, including private-public or NGO-public partnerships that could work in a variety of different ways. Livestock play such an important role in helping to make livelihoods in rural Ethiopia more robust, and livestock disease correspondingly has such devastating effects in increasing vulnerability, that greater priority clearly needs to be given to improving effectiveness and coverage in this branch of rural service delivery.

The fifth policy challenge emphasized by the PPA, which also links closely back to the first two challenges is to bring urban growth more into the poverty reduction mainstream than it has been in the past. Even if sustained agricultural growth can be achieved in Ethiopia, and there is a big “if” attached to that outcome, the country is going to have to undergo an accelerated rural-urban transition in the near future. With a population estimated at 77 million people, the low 15 per cent urban share is possibly without precedent in worldwide experience of processes of long run development. It is not a matter of choosing urban growth instead of agriculture-led growth; the former is complementary to the latter by providing rising demand for more diversified and higher value agricultural output. More than this, urban growth is the only process by which pressure can be taken off land scarcity, farm size decline, and environmental deterioration in rural areas.

In summary the findings of the Ethiopia PPA 2004-05 suggests that future poverty reduction strategy requires a rebalancing of priorities so that promotion of agriculture is placed in a broader context of facilitating the transition from farm to non-farm occupations in Ethiopia. The risk of the current strategy is that gains in agriculture will be continuously eroded by farm sub-division and shrinking grazing land, resulting in rural household standards-of-living remaining more or less the same indefinitely.

In the end the only route out of this impasse is to encourage people to move out of the agricultural sector at a faster rate, and this will mean taking a positive rather than negative stance on urbanisation, including building urban growth into development plans, anticipating urban infrastructure problems in advance rather than waiting until severe urban squalor has occurred, facilitating rather than discouraging cross-sectoral mobility and migration, and

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allowing people to combine farm and non-farm occupations withour real or imagined fears about losing their land rights. Of course, these are relative, not absolute conclusions. However, they do have significant implications for the evolving balance between sectors and policy priorities in the future development of the SDPRP in Ethiopia.

References

Ellis, F. and H.A. Freeman, 2004, ‘Rural Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction Strategies in Four African Countries’, Journal of Development Studies, Vol.40, No.4, pp.1-30

Ellis, F. and T. Woldehanna, 2004, Ethiopia Participatory Poverty Assessment 2004-05: PPA Manual, unpublished document, November

Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF), 2002, The 2002/3 PPA Methodology: “A Field Guide”, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: ESRF, February, mimeo document

Ethiopia, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED), 2002a, Poverty Profile of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, March

Ethiopia, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED), 2002b, Ethiopia: Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction Program, Addis Ababa, July

Norton, A., B. Bird, K. Brock, M. Kakande and C. Turk, 2001, A Rough Guide to PPAs, London: Overseas Development Institute

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ANNEX A

ETHIOPIA PPA 2004-05: TABLE OF SITE NAMES

ID Region Zone Name Woreda Name Kebele Name Rural or Urban

1 Tigray North Western Tigray Asegede Tsimbela Debre Abay Rural

2 Tigray Eastern Tigray Hawzen Debre Medhanit Rural3 Tigray Southern Tigray Ambalaje Amede Weha Rural4 Tigray Mekele Mekele Town Adi Islam Urban5 Afar Zone 1 Dubti Arado Rural6 Afar Zone 1 Asayita Town Enchet Sefer Urban7 Amhara Wag Hemra Dehana Guled Mariam Rural8 Amhara North Wollo Habru Mehal Amba Rural9 Amhara South Wollo Debresina Tach Wale Rural

10 Amhara North Shewa Basona Werana Bakelo Rural11 Amhara Dessie Dessie Town Segno Gebeya Urban12 Amhara East Gojam Enemay Shibetam Rural13 Amhara South Gonder Lay Gayint Shebet Rural14 Amhara Agew Awi Ankesha Buya Eyesus Rural15 Amhara Bahir Dar Bahir Dar Town Menaheria Urban16 Oromia West Wellega Gimbi Chuta Sedu Rural17 Oromia Illubabor Metu Meru Ekele Rural18 Oromia Jimma Limu Kosa Babu Rural19 Oromia West Shewa Cheliya Legdeamna Wayu Rural20 Oromia West Harerghe Habro Kuter 04 Rural21 Oromia West Harerghe Darolebu Jelebo Rural22 Oromia East Harerghe Kurfa Chele Hida Roba Rural

Table continues. . . . . . .

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. . . . .continuation of previous page

ID Region Zone Name Woreda Name Kebele Name Rural or Urban23 Oromia East Harerghe Meta Kebenawa Kuter Rural24 Oromia Bale Sinanana Dinsho Kaso Shekmera Rural25 Oromia Borena Teltele Kalo Rural26 Oromia Adama Special Nazret Town Sar Sefer Urban27 Oromia Jimma Jimma Town Hirmata Mertina Urban28 Somalia Shinile Shinile Birak Rural29 Somalia Jijiga Jijiga Town Dugdahade Urban30 B-Gumuz Asosa Bambasi Shobera Rural31 B-Gumuz Asosa Asosa Town Gebreiel Sefer Urban32 SNNP Guraghe Cheha Gasorena Chancho Rural33 SNNP Hadiya Soro Weshieba Rural34 SNNP Kembata - Tembaro Angacha Hawora Arara Rural35 SNNP Sidama Dale Muticma Gorbie Rural36 SNNP Gedeo Wenago Chichu Rural37 SNNP Wolayta Boloso Sore Weyibo Rural38 SNNP Bench Maji Bench Endekale Rural39 SNNP Konso Special Konso Gaho Rural40 SNNP Sidama Awasa Town Admass Village Urban41 SNNP Arba Minch Arba Minch Town Netch Sare Urban42 Dire Dawa Dire Dawa Town Dire Dawa Town Filwhoa Urban43 Harari Hundene Harar Town Buda Aber Urban44 Addis Ababa Addis Ababa Kolfie Keraniyo Megid Akababi Urban45 Addis Ababa Addis Ababa Arada Selasie Gebeya Urban