Food Security and Resource Access: A Final Report on the Community Assessments in South Wello and Oromiya Zones of Amhara Region, Ethiopia

Abstract

"This paper examines aspects of severe food insecurity and resource access in 21 sampled communities of South Wello and Oromiya zones of Amhara Region. The information was collected by a multi-disciplinary team as part of a collaborative research project of the Institute for Development Research (IDR) of Addis Ababa University and the BASIS Horn of Africa Program. The research team conducted rapid community assessments from April to July 1999, in the midst of widespread and severe crisis culminating from repeated poor harvests and the failure of the year's big rains. These events had significantly enhanced peasant vulnerability to food shortages. The paper presents the perceptions of community members regarding interlinked aspects of production failures and food-insecurity, on the one hand, and resource access and coping strategies, on the other. Its intent is to provide an overview of key conditions and trends, rather than a comprehensive portrait of individual communities or the 1999 food shortage...

"The project has three main research components: a regional market center survey led by Tegegne Gebre-Egziabher and Gary Gaile; community assessments (to be covered in this paper); and a household and intrahousehold survey to be carried out in 2000-2001. The community assessments are intended to provide socioeconomic and institutional information of both a qualitative and quantitative nature about the South Wello and Oromiya communities to supplement the market and household surveys, as well as to serve as a data base for analysis on their own. The aim is to forge an overall research design that spans the regional to the intrahousehold level."