Impact of income diversification on rural household food security in Ethiopia

Abstract

Using primary data collected from 462 farm households, this paper aims to examine the impact of income diversification on rural household food security in Ethiopia. A propensity score matching model was employed to analyze the impact of participation in both agriculture and non-agriculture activities on household food security. The results indicate that age, education level, household size, number of contacts with extension agents, and numbers of livestock in tropical livestock units have a significant effect on household participation in both agriculture and non-agriculture sources of income generation. The propensity score matching result suggested that participation in both agriculture and non-agriculture would increase the rural household food security status by 10.6% to 19.5%, mainly due to a positive effect of additional sources of income generation from non-agriculture activities as witnessed in present and past studies. Therefore, to make considerable improvement on the food security situation, there is need to promote and scale-up on-farm, off-farm and non-farm income-generating activities in rural areas to diversify income sources so as to improve food security status of the rural households in Ethiopia.

Keywords:

• Ethiopia
• food security
• income
• propensity score matching
• rural household

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) for supporting our study through the Stress Tolerant Maize for Africa (STMA) project, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [grant number OPP1134248]. We are also grateful to the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Declarations

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used for the study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

1 Non-farm income generated from activities outside of agricultural market systems. Non-farm sectors include construction, health care, hospitality, education, mining, and tourism.

2 Off-farm income encompasses all agriculture-related activities that occur beyond the farm. Off-farm income includes the ‘middle’ and ‘end’ of the process, as agricultural goods leave the farm to ultimately reach the consumer. Examples of off-farm income and enterprises include extension services, processing, packaging, storage, transportation and distribution, and retail sale.

3 This study defined a participant in agriculture as a household who engaged in on-farm activities and whose income was generated from only on-farm sources. A participant in non-agriculture is defined as a household who engaged in either or both non-farm and off-farm activities and whose income was generated from either or a combination of these two types of activities.

4 Expected treatment effect on the treated is the difference between the outcome of treated and the outcome of the treated observations if they had not been treated.

5 Regarding the food security status of the surveyed households, about 60% were in the food secure category, while the remaining 40% were in the food insecure category. In the food insecure category (out of the 40%), about 11% were mildly food secure, while the rest, 22% and 7%, were moderately and severely food insecure, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: [Grant Number INV-009934/OPP1134248].