Multidimensional poverty of pastoralists and implications for policy in Boorana rangeland system, Southern Ethiopia

Poverty is pervasive in Ethiopia. Despite its experience of promising economic growth, the development process of Ethiopia has not equitably benefited pastoralists, where multidimensional deprivation(1) is deeply entrenched. This study argues that pastoral poverty is the result of multifaceted indicators. This study has also practical implications to inform policymakers on how to reduce pastoralist poverty. The study was based on Alkire and Foster method to analyze households cross-sectional survey data (n = 332). Various descriptive statistics and logit model was used to analyze the data. The result showed that 87.3% of households were multidimensionally poor with 62.1% of intensity of poverty. Multidimensional poverty index (MPI) for Boorana pastoralists was high (54.2%). The majority of Boorana pastoralist households were deprived of cooking fuel, drinking water, electricity, ownership of durable assets, housing, child school attendance, and years of schooling. Deprivation in education was the largest contributor to MPI followed by standard of living. Econometric results showed that multidimensional poverty is determined by household head gender and age, size of cultivated land, highest education level of a household member, sanitation, home to center/town distance, and production per hectare of land. The result implied that much works are needed to obviate the factors associated with multidimensional poverty of the household. The study proposes that improvement of pastoralist access to education and standard of living through improving pastoralist access to education, electricity, clean water, and health facilities should be a priority for policy on poverty alleviation.