Abstract

Access to different levels and combination of asset has a major influence on choice of livelihood options and wellbeing of households. Knowledge of rural people’s access to livelihood capitals would be critical to improve their living standards. Therefore, this study investigated access to livelihood capitals by wealth in southern Ethiopia with evidence from Boloso Sore district. Data was collected from 120 randomly chosen households and analyzed using X² test, one-way ANOVA and descriptive statistics. The results indicate that distribution of livelihood capitals in the study area are skewed by wealth showing that the majority of the production resources are owned by small fraction of the smallholders. Access to human (education), financial (credit), natural (land), social (membership to agricultural cooperatives), physical (home, water and farm input) capitals; especially by the poor households, are at best scant. There is a need to address the issue of inequitable access to these assets by wealth so that the poor may be equally benefited. The key strategies to improve their livelihoods are to divert the community from land to non land options and promote diversification strategies while enhancing the access to financial resources.

Keywords:

Financial, human, natural, physical, social,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.