Chronic Poverty in Rural Ethiopia through the Lens of Life-histories

Abstract

Studying chronic poverty using retrospective qualitative data (life-histories) in conjunction with longitudinal panel data is now recognized to provide deep and reliable insights. This paper uses three rounds of panel data and life-histories collected by Young Lives, a longitudinal study of childhood poverty, to identify factors that contribute to households becoming or remaining poor in rural Ethiopia. It combines a case-centred and a variable-centred approach, analysing and comparing the experiences of individual households (cases) using qualitative and quantitative techniques and interrogating these findings by looking at attributes of households (variables) across a larger sample. The substantive findings on poverty ‘drivers’ and ‘maintainers’ support those of previous studies: rainfall, illness, debt, exclusion from the main social protection scheme. But by mixing different types of data and analysis, the paper shows that combinations of factors rather than single events drive households into poverty, and that household characteristics play an important role. The primary contribution of the paper is methodological as it presents a novel method of using life-histories to investigate chronic poverty in rural Ethiopia by generating or testing hypotheses/findings on poverty drivers and maintainers.

Keywords:

• Ethiopia
• Chronic poverty
• Life-histories
• Panel data
• Mixed methods
• Case studies

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Frank Ellis for his insightful comments. The data used in this paper come from Young Lives, a long-term international research project investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty (www.younglives.org.uk). Young Lives is core-funded by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID) for the benefit of developing countries. The views expressed are those of the author(s). They are not necessarily those of, or endorsed by, Young Lives, the University of Oxford, DFID or other funders.

Notes

1. Defined in Hulme et al. (2001, p. 12) as comprising both households who have expenditure or incomes or consumption levels in each period below a poverty line and households whose mean expenditures over all periods are less than the poverty line, but who are not poor in every period.

2. Biases relating to memory may be reduced by the way the data are elicited (e.g. linking questions to significant household or national events).

3. We interviewed two household members in every household, one male and one female (typically the mother and the father of the index child), except in the case of eight female-headed households.

4. All names of sites and respondents are pseudonyms.

5. See [http://www.younglives.org.uk/what-we-do/research-methods/qualitative-sub-sample-research].

6. The category of stable includes two subcategories of ‘always poor’ and ‘never poor’ within the period of data collection (7.5 years). The focus of this paper is stable and downwards trajectories.

7. There were two female-headed households who according to the taxonomy had moved out of poverty during the three rounds of data collection, even though they still characterized themselves as poor. In one of these cases, the household head had been imprisoned and faced a large fine for failing to guard a community irrigation pump. This was a significant event that was not captured by the variables used in the taxonomy.

8. The PSNP, which was introduced in 2005, aims to reduce household vulnerability, improve resilience to shocks, and decrease dependence on food aid. The programme has over eight million participants and provides food or cash for work such as digging ditches, and direct support to a smaller number of households with no adult labour.

9. US$1 = 18.1 ETB (Financial Times, 18 October 2012).

10. The Other Food Security Programme is an extension and credit programme in which households are required to participate to continue receiving benefits from the PSNP. The reason for this is that it is intended to support graduation from the PSNP.

11. See [http://www.younglives.org.uk/files/others/questionnaires/r1/ethiopia/YL-R1-ET-Caregiver-1yr-old-Manual-Sept2002.pdf], accessed 18 October 2012.

12. Our thanks to Frank Ellis for this observation.

13. See, for example, a recent DFID-funded study on index-based rainfall insurance in rural Ethiopia, [http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/research/research-themes/projectDetails?res_id=343].

14. One of the authors was involved in the collection of the qualitative data and the final round of the quantitative data while they were working for Young Lives.

15. The analysis is further restricted by the limited range of variables that are available in round one as the original design was focused on health rather than livelihoods.