Multidimensional Measure And Analysis Of Household Poverty And Wellbeing

The world is growing fast with the innovation of new and advanced technologies.The measurement of poverty and/or wellbeing is a major challenge of the world in the 21 st century.The nature of poverty is getting deep and complex as countries of the world go through tough economic and political competition.The question of whether the focus on income/ consumption expenditure approach to address the complex nature of poverty is not yet answered but helped for the development of many theoretical approaches.Poverty in Ethiopia has many causes such as economic,social,demographic,geographic,environmental as well as policy related.It is officially measured using income/ consumption expenditure approach.Under this approach,Ethiopia has reported poverty at the national level and the regional level showed declining.Progress at the national and regional level is not enough and excludes the sub-regional situation of poverty.As it has many causes,measuring and analyzing poverty using the income approach seems inappropriate and cannot capture all determinant factors of poverty.Understanding the concept of poverty other than measurement should be at the top priority in research.Given the limitation in the income/ consumption expenditure approach,alternative method of measuring and analyzing poverty is needed that can capture the mix of factors determining poverty.This paper had the objective to measure and analyze the multidimensional poverty and/or wellbeing in Debremarkos city by using the Nested Spheres of Poverty model.This model has a unique characteristic to measure and analyze poverty in that it provides a scientific method to assign weights to indicators and provides information about who are the poor,where are the poor,how poor they are and which indicators need immediate actions by the concerned body.Basically this paper would add values to the existing literature by filling the gap on the current official measurement and analysis of poverty in Ethiopia which is income/expenditure approach.For the purpose of selecting the sample size,the researcher has used the systematic random sampling techniques followed by stratified and purposive sampling so as to select the enumerator areas and the sample size of the survey.Accordingly,a total of 9 enumerator areas(in the researcher‘s context,Kebeles)and 174 sample respondents were selected.Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS)was used to analyze the data collected from the households.The paper has a total of six contents that incorporates the main agendas related to the topic(the research problem).This includes the introduction or background of the study,the literature review and theoretical basis of the paper,the analysis of the current situation of poverty in Ethiopia,research methodology and sources of data,econometric model building and empirical verification and finally the conclusion and recommendation of the paper.Poverty is a complex,dynamic and multidimensional issue that needs multidimensional method of measurement.Recently different types of multidimensional indices have been introduced to address the dynamic nature of poverty such as: human development index,physical quality of life index,multidimensional poverty index and nested spheres of poverty models are some of them.The current situation of poverty at the national level and regional level has showed different results for different methods.The result from the income poverty at the national level indicated that,the headcount index,poverty gap and severity showed a declining trend from time to time.The headcount index for example has been reduced from 45.5 in 1995/96 to 23.5 in 2015/16 and the poverty gap was reduced from 12.9 in 1995/96 to 6.7 in 2015/16.The severity index at the national level also declined from 5.1 in 1995/96 to 2.8 in 2015/16.The same is true for the rural and urban poverty in Ethiopia,showed declining.The overall result from the data analysis indicated that family size,household age,conflict,types of household and access to credit are the major determinant factors that contribute to the household‘s multiple deprivation.According to the result from the analysis,it is indicated that majority of the households in each kebele are critically poor in all dimensions except knowledge and economic spheres.Muaket and Maseltegna have scored the lowest achievement out of 9 kebeles.Generally speaking,all kebeles do have either critical poor or medium poor level of achievement except the economic spheres.Thus,the researcher recommends the government and other concerned stackholders to implement appropriate poverty reduction strategies so as to improve the living standards of the households.The logistic regression model was employed to identify the major factors influencing poverty with the probability of being multidimensional poor as a dependent variable and socioeconomic variables as some explanatory variables.The result showed that household size,conflict,household age and types of households(rural or urban)are the major determinant factor at Debremarkos city.The counter measures to be taken need to start from identifying of the promising basis of poverty reduction in the city.Debremarkos city has many promising basis for poverty reduction.These includes tourism(religious places,hotels,king‘s palace and mountains and wild life),trade and investment(education,health,industry,transport),environmental related basis(water resources,forest resources,human capital).Once identified this,the government need to develop appropriate policy and strategy to facilitate the ways and means to use these resources for poverty reduction.Specially to pay attention on the distribution of social services,access to transportation,creating employment opportunities,empowering women,reducing conflict that caused political and social unrest,providing access to conducive environment,helping households to better use the natural resources like forests and rivers for their livelihood etc.Apart from the poor housing condition,majority of the household are living with rented house in which it affects their economic wellbeing,households need to get access to land to build their own house.Households who run their own business also needs access to credit to facilitate their business capacity.