Characteristics of Climate Change Risk, Vulnerability and Adaptation in Cotton and Sugarcane Producing Regions of Ethiopia

Climate change is a global concern mainly due to its effect on two parameters that affect the ecological setup particularly agriculture – increase in the average temperature and rainfall variability. Even though the agriculture sector as a whole is vulnerable to climate hazards including flood and drought, climate change poses a particular threat to certain agricultural commodities and social groups, due to difference in agro-ecology and heterogeneity in non – climate change drivers of vulnerability. This context specific nature of the impact of climate change calls for the need to identify adaptation options to build a climate resilient production of particular agricultural commodities and vulnerable groups. In addition to coffee, the Agricultural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI) strategy and the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) clearly stipulate that sugar and textile are strategic export commodities in the industrial development strategy of Ethiopia. They are labour intensive, have broad linkages with the rest of the economy, use agricultural products as inputs, are export-oriented and import substituting, and contribute to rapid technological transfer. They are strategic commodities because they are crucial in transforming the country’s economy from the agriculture – led into industry - led economy within the GTP period of 2011 - 2015

Putting Children First: New Frontiers in the Fight Against Child Poverty in Africa

Despite important strides in the fight against poverty in the past two decades, child poverty remains widespread and persistent, particularly in Africa. Poverty in all its dimensions is detrimental for early childhood development and often results in unreversed damage to the lives of girls and boys, locking children and families into intergenerational poverty. This edited volume contributes to the policy initiatives aiming to reduce child poverty and academic understanding of child poverty and its solutions by bringing together applied research from across the continent. With the Sustainable Development Goals having opened up an important space for the fight against child poverty, not least by broadening its conceptualization to be multidimensional, this collection aims to push the frontiers by challenging existing narratives and exploring alternative understandings of the complexities and dynamics underpinning child poverty. Furthermore, it examines policy options that work to address this critical challenge.Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) at the University of Bergen.publishedVersio

Shocks and primary school drop-out rates: A study of 20 sentinel sites in Ethiopia

This paper investigates the impact of idiosyncratic and covariate economic shocks, and the resulting work burden on children, on the likelihood of children completing primary education or dropping out of primary school. In this endeavour, censored Cox proportional hazards model was estimated using data from the Young Lives study of childhood poverty. The estimated results indicate that both idiosyncratic shocks and covariate shocks have a statistically significant effect on the risk of children dropping out of primary school. Moreover, the amount of time children allocate to domestic activities, unpaid activities and paid labour were each found to have a positive effect on the probability of children dropping out of school. Separate Weibull accelerated failure time models for boys and girls and for rural and urban children were estimated to check the robustness of the results and the relative importance of the economic shocks to different groups of children. It was observed that the statistical significance and the sign of the coefficients remained the same. Considering the fact that both idiosyncratic and area-wide economic shocks are experienced at the household level, the study concludes that it is vital to take education into account when designing social protection programmes so as reduce the vulnerability of households to the shocks and keep children from dropping out from school. One way of doing this would be to introduce a conditional cash transfer programme that would provide families with incentives to keep their children enrolled in school.</p

Putting Children First: New Frontiers in the Fight Against Child Poverty in Africa

Despite important strides in the fight against poverty in the past two decades, child poverty remains widespread and persistent, particularly in Africa. Poverty in all its dimensions is detrimental for early childhood development and often results in unreversed damage to the lives of girls and boys, locking children and families into intergenerational poverty. This edited volume contributes to the policy initiatives aiming to reduce child poverty and academic understanding of child poverty and its solutions by bringing together applied research from across the continent. With the Sustainable Development Goals having opened up an important space for the fight against child poverty, not least by broadening its conceptualization to be multidimensional, this collection aims to push the frontiers by challenging existing narratives and exploring alternative understandings of the complexities and dynamics underpinning child poverty. Furthermore, it examines policy options that work to address this critical challenge