LIVELIHOOD DIVERSIFICATION STRATEGIES AMONG THE BORANA PASTORAL COMMUNITIES OF YABELLO DISTRICT, OROMIA REGION, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

Different climate related risks such as recurrent droughts, high temperature, low rainfall and bush encroachment and climate induced risks such interethnic conflicts, shrinkages of rangelands, and dwindling of social supporting systems are the major problems in Borana pastoralists which make them less dependent on pastoralism alone. Due to that, the pastoralists in the study area, in order to cope with changing climate and social structures, many of them are choosing to increase the diversity of their livelihood strategies to non pastoral strategies. This study aimed at identifying and describing the existing livelihood options, the determinants of the choice of the households’ livelihood strategies and their perception towards non pastoral activities in the pastoral areas of Yabello district. The data for this study were obtained from a survey of 180 household heads selected using simple random sampling technique in the year 2016. The key informants interview and focus group discussion were undertaken to gather data having qualitative nature. Descriptive, inferential and econometric tools were used to analyze the data. The result of the descriptive statistics showed that the majority of the sample respondent households thus, 48.3% allocated all their labor force to pastoral and farming activities alone, while about 29.5% were involved in a combination of pastoral, farming and low return non pastoral nonfarm livelihood strategy and 22% work on pastoral, farming and high return non pastoral nonfarm combination of livelihood strategy. The inferential statistics results showed the existence of a significant difference among livelihood categories. The result of the multinomial logit model revealed that out of the fourteen variables included in the model nine explanatory variables were found to significantly influence the choice of livelihood strategies at different level of significance. Family size, education status, livestock holding and access to credit and dependency ratio significantly affected the household's choice into pastoral, farming and high return non pastoral nonfarm activities. Further, sex of household head, family size, access to extension, age of the household head and distance from the nearest market influenced the household's choice into pastoral, farming and low return non pastoral nonfarm strategy. Pastoral households have different access to resources and face different opportunities and challenges and thus choose different livelihood strategies calling for tailor made policy and development practice accordingly in line with their livelihood strategies choice.