Economic Strengthening Intervention For Food Security and Poverty Reduction The case of Urban HIV and AIDS Nutrition and Food Security Project participants in Dessie

Abstract

Urban poverty is a widely and deep-rooted problem in both large and small cities of Ethiopian urban areas. Focus on people living below the poverty line, and livelihood support aims to diversify and improve household level income in the long run considered as core principles for reducing vulnerability and poverty, and promoting more productive livelihoods. Therefore, Economic Strengthening (ES) intervention were implemented under Urban HIV and AIDS and Nutrition and Food Security (UHANFS) project towns, where Dessie city became the one to be covered by the program; and also purposefully selected for this evaluative study. The major objective of this research was to assess effectiveness of the ES intervention towards achieving food security and poverty reduction of its project participants. To conduct the study, from total 340 ES participants, 77 of them selected using systematic random sampling from first (2012) and second (2013) project batches that already received full package of the intervention by 2015 and 2016, respectively. To determine change on food security status, food consumption score (FCS) method was used as a tool to categorize by four FS status; and to assess status of poverty, poverty line against income per person per day using World Bank’s Purchasing-Power Parity (PPP) conversion was administered, which become 13.87 ETB as cut-off point. Results of the study pronounced that 64 (83.1%) become food secured; 94.8% escaped the poverty line; and 72 (93.5%) of microenterprises’ performance achieved improvement. Hence, the study concluded, the ES intervention was an effective intervention, which was well designed and suited for its urban impoverished participants restrained by PLHIVs status (100%), gender (80%) and illiteracy (31.17%) – but succeeded to improve their livelihood. Despite the attained successes, the ES participants were surrounded with bottleneck determinant variables, for example inaccessible credit services from MFI (58.5%) and inconvenient working premises (40%). The research, hence, speaks out that Business Development Services (BDS) facilitation should be ensured for the ES participants as well as for other disadvantaged population groups to assist them establish and expand microenterprises combat urban poverty.