An Assessment of Rural Households Livelihood Assets of Wolaita Zone, Ethiopia

The aim of this study was to assess existing rural household’s livelihood assets in Wolaita zone, Ethiopia. The demographic and socio-economic data were collected from 300 randomly selected rural households. The basic data for the study were obtained from both primary and secondary sources. The collected data were analysed by using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The study revealed land is one of the basic economic assets of and livelihood sources for agrarian rural people but the size of the plots is so small in the study area. The findings concerning the livelihood assets that had been developed were presented in line with the three livelihood assets, namely human, natural, and financial capital, all of which were shown to have negative results. The above-mentioned livelihood assets in the study area were weak. From the human assets section, 41percent of the study population had not achieved a school educational qualification. About half percent of respondents said their soil was not fertile from the physical assets perspective. A large number of respondents did not practise saving on account of their low daily-income status. Thus concerning body including government should strongly work on the discussed rural assets built up to minimize the rural household’s livelihood problems in study area.


Introduction
This study was aimed to assess the household livelihood assets such as the human, natural, and financial assets to determine how crucial they were in realizing the sustainable livelihood outcomes for the respective rural communities. Thus, based on the livelihood framework, the three categories of assets were examined during the fieldwork phase of the research.

Human Capital
As different literature sources indicate, human capital consists of the skills, knowledge and ability to exert physical and mental efforts for production processes and good health that enables an individual or household to pursue different livelihood strategies in order to achieve desirable livelihood outcomes (Scoones, 2009;Bennet, 2010). In this study, human capital was assessed from the point of view of household labour requirements and level of education.

Source of Labour in Study Area
The respondents were asked to indicate their sources of labour for their rural economic activities or farming activities.
As presented in Table 1, the majority of households in the study area depended on family labour to meet the labour requirements of their various livelihood strategies. About 69 percent of respondents in Damot Sore and almost 80 percent of the respondents in both Damot Gale and Damot Pulasa were dependent exclusively on family labour to meet the labour demands of their farming activities. Households using hired labour were insignificant in the study area: for instance, 2.1 percent in Damot Sore; 3.4 percent in Damot Gale and 4.3 percent in Damot Pulasa used hired labour for their livelihood strategies. However, 29.2 percent in Damot Sore, 17 percent in Damot Gale and 16 percent in Damot Pulasa used both hired and family labour. Generally, in the study area, three-quarters of the respondents indicated that family members were their source of labour. In the study area, hired labourers were used mainly and only during the harvesting season. But the quality of labour was dependent on other social criteria such as the health status of the respondent, the level of educational attainment, that person's perceptions towards work and to the skills of individuals.

Educational Attainment of Study Population
Education is one of the tools which sharpens the knowledge and skills of human beings enabling them to exploit the existing resources from the earth's surface and to improve their lives through safe and adequate means. Education is also one of the factors affecting the householder's access to a source of labour and to labour quality. Educated people are more skilled or potentially able to adopt new ideas and technology easily and have greater access to employment as opposed to the uneducated members of a community. In this next section of the paper the educational attainment of household heads is discussed. As Table 2 indicates, 41 percent of the household heads sampled in this study could not read and write. The study districts showed variations in their literacy rates. For instance, in Damot Sore woreda, more than half of the people were illiterate, while in the Damot Gale and Damot Pulasa woredas, the number of illiterate people was similar, with 36 percent in each case. In terms of the number of household heads who had attended secondary schools, the Damot Gale woreda had a figure of 29 percent, whereas the woredas at Damot Pulasa and Damot Sore presented with figures of 18 percent and 15.6 percent respectively. In general, of the total respondents in the study area, nearly 12 percent were diploma-and above certificate holders. This low literacy rate for the study area has its own negative impacts on the labour supply, labour quality and labour productivity and also resulted in the low livelihood security of the study community.

Natural Capital
As the various literature sources indicate, particularly in terms of economic theory, physical capital is one of the primary factors of production, including inputs for production processes and natural resources such as human labour and land respectively. Natural capital is directly related to human and financial capital. Most of the productivity directed at agrarian rural people's' livelihoods is directly dependent on the availability and adequacy of natural capital such as access to farmland and its size, the fertility of the soil, the natural vegetation and climatic factors. Where the provision and quality of these resources are insufficient, the lives and livelihoods of the rural households are highly threatened.
In the following part of this research, aspects of the physical capital are discussed in the context of the sampled community.

Size of Landholding
One of land-related problem in the study area has been the declining size of the farmland over time. As presented in Table 3(present it on the next page), the sizes of the individual landholdings of the Wolaita zone are showing a continuous decline as time progresses. This is on account of the rapid population growth and the formation of additional new households that demand farmland from year to year. The distribution of the individual landholdings Research on Humanities and Social Sciences www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-5766 (Paper) ISSN 2225-0484 (Online) Vol.10, No.5, 2020 of the rural households is presented in the said table for the periods prior to the 10-years-ago mark, prior to 20years-ago mark, and prior to the 30-years-ago mark. As the data show, during the period prior to the 30-years-ago mark, about 40percent of the household heads owned more than two hectares of land. But the percentage of household heads in this category of landholding had declined to 22 percent after the 10-years-ago mark; and again, this proportion had decreased to 10percent after the 20-years-ago mark. Also, currently, the proportion of households owning more than two hectares in the study area amounted to five percent. Contrary to this category, households owning less than 0.25 hectares amounted to 2.4 percent prior to 30-years-ago mark and this value rose to 21percent prior to the 10-years-ago mark of their having been in the study area. Besides these values, according to the surveyed data, the proportion of households owning less than 0.25 hectares of farmland has dramatically increased to 44 percent in the present time.
Of the three sampled study areas, the decrease in the landholding size over time in the Damot Sore woreda has proved to have been the most serious. Individual households which prior to the 30-years-ago mark had owned more than two hectares of farmland constituted 53 percent of the sampled population in this woreda, while households which possessed less than 0.25 hectares at that time had constituted only one percent of the sampled population. However, at the present time, only 3.1% of the individuals in the Damot Sore woreda now own more than two hectares of farmland. As a further contrast, the number of households holding less than 0.25 hectares of farmland has skyrocketed and now makes up 47percent of the total sampled population of this woreda. This means that there has been a rapid decrease in the size of the landholdings in this particular woreda (See Table 3).
On the other hand, changes in land size with time have been relatively but also significantly sluggish in the Damot Pulasa woreda. The rural average for the landholding distribution of the individual households in the study area prior to the 30-years-ago mark was 1.75 hectares and it became 1.35 hectares prior to the 20-years-ago mark. The variation amounted to 0.4 hectares in the 10-year gap. Also, as the surveyed data reveals, the average landholding size in the Wolaita zone prior to the 10-years-ago mark, and that for the recent (current) situation amounted to 1.0 and 0.59 hectares respectively (Table 3).
To sum up, the landholdings of households and their access to the land for their farming activities has been in a state of uninterrupted change. A comparison of the size of the present landholdings with those dating back 30, 20 and 10 years back, reveals a considerable decline in the size of farmland through time(see Table 3)

Soil and its Fertility
Soil is one of the basic natural assets for the productivity of the agricultural sector and for people whose livelihoods depend on farming. Agricultural productivity depends on, amongst others, the soil texture, the size of the soil particles, soil fertility, and the water-holding capacity of the soil. From these different criteria, which are used for distinguishing between the qualities of the respective soils, the researcher used the fertility of the farmland soil of the rural households of the study area for this paper since the fertility of the soil is one of the strong determinants affecting food security and the livelihood conditions of the rural community.
As the study reveals, 48 percent of the study population indicated that they considered their soils to be infertile (Table 4). Also, only 24 percent and 12 percent of the study population perceived that their farmland plots were fertile and very fertile respectively. Besides these observations, information gleaned from the peasant householders, during the focus group discussion phase, revealed that soil fertility is perceived as a serious problem leading to low harvest yields from their farmlands from year to year, and also that in the light of the shortage of land, the main cause of soil infertility is the frequent cultivation of farmland without fallow periods.

Natural Vegetation Coverage
Owing to the rapid population growth in the Wolaita area, indigenous forest growth and coverage were virtually nullified and, instead, replaced by exotic forests. Furthermore, there was no open land for natural vegetational coverage. However, there are still vestiges of some of the indigenous types of forests in some sacred areas, along river banks and around religious institutional compounds. The absence of natural vegetational coverage has its own impacts on the livelihood situation of the poor rural households. Also, because of the limited vegetational coverage, the local environment is being degraded over time, resulting in the drying up of swampy areas, streams, and rivers during the dry season.
The eucalyptus is an exotic tree that is dominant in the Wolaita area. It is also planted along the margins of the farmlands of each rural household. Some of the agricultural plantations/orchards of mango trees, avocado trees, bananas and orange trees also make the area green. But during the focus group discussion phase, the elder peasants indicated that the absence of natural vegetation and the open land in the rural areas were seriously affecting their livelihoods in that they were prevented from rearing livestock, which is very important for gaining access to milk and milk products. Moreover, they were of the opinion that animal rearing is essential for maintaining soil fertility, which depends on animal waste l(e.g. dung/manure)being applied to their plots of land. Thus, the absence of or a change in the natural vegetational cover in the rural areas has multifaceted negative impacts on the livelihoods of the rural communities in the Wolaita zone.

Financial Capital
The financial issue is the blood vessel for every socio-economic activity performed by a given communitywhether in an urban or a rural context. For rural communities, accessing farmland; sending children to school; feeding a family; getting medical treatment from health centres; procuring basic consumer goods such as clothing, sugar, and salt, from markets; the purchasing of agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides and selected seeds; and finance and gaining access to savings; -all become a crucial part of a rural community's livelihood. In this study, the welfare of a community in terms of its financial capital is assessed by looking at, amongst others, its access to credit services, livestock production and the incomes of rural households.

Access to Credit Services and Savings
A household's access to credit services and savings is a good indicator of its financial capital status. Here, respondents were asked whether they had borrowed money during times of food insecurity and livelihood challenges and what their sources of credit were. The respondents were also asked whether they had ever saved money and their means of saving.
As presented in Table 5, of the total of 300 sampled household heads, about 60 percent (181) of the study respondents replied that they had received credit during poor seasons and that it had been placed at their disposal in order to solve their livelihood problems. But the remaining 40 percent (119) of the respondents indicated that they had not received any credit from any institution during their lifetime. Those respondents who did have access to a credit system were asked to indicate the sources from which they had accessed their credit.
As presented in Figure 2, about 45percent of the respondents replied that they had obtained credit services from micro-financing institutions and also about three percent had received credit from commercial banks. This means that less than half of the interviewed population had accessed credit services from official or formal financial institutions in the study area. As such, concerned bodies should work strictly on creating awareness in rural communities as to the benefits that could accrue to them through the activities of formal financial institutions that provide credit services for rural communities. Instead of this, the credit beneficiaries would have serious problems in repaying loans. According to the rules of the financial institutions, anybody who has not repaid a previous loan would not have access to take out a second loan. The majority of credit beneficiaries stated that they considered the money was given to them as a gesture of support, but that the financial institutions, such as the microfinance and commercial banks, wanted the money to be repaid. However, the study determined that on account of the livelihood problems in the study area, the rural householders were not able to pay back their loans.
Contrary to this, about 52 percent of respondents replied that they had used the credit services of informal institutions as in the case of local money lenders (21.5%), from relatives (19%) and from friends (12.2%) in the study area (Figure 2). These practices have their own deleterious side effects relating to the return of credit, that impact on the rural people's lives. If they do not return the money timeously to these groups, the result might be conflicts and the complete loss of their property, including their land, to the credit providers. During the focus group discussions, senior peasants said that some of their neighbouring households had lost their land because of credit-return-related problems and had become landless. In fact, some of the cases had actually gone to court. Thus, local government and formal financial institutions should work strongly to discourage informal credit sources and to find appropriate loan repayment methods for rural households in Wolaita zone.
As shown in Table 6, large numbers of rural communities in the study area were not habitually saving (56%). The number of respondents who practised saving slightly differed from one study area to the other. For instance, in the Damot Pulasa woreda, about 47percent of the study population indicated that they were habitually saving as opposed to the 42percent in the Damot Gale woreda. Generally, in the Wolaita zone -particularly in the rural areas -the data show that 44 percent of the rural householders were practising saving.
Respondents who practised saving were also asked to indicate the institutions or informal places that they were using to accommodate their savings habit. As presented in Table 7, more than half of the respondents were using Omo Microfinance. The second way for saving was not via a modern financial institution but according to the traditional way of money saving which applies in many parts of Ethiopia and is called the Ikub system. Although this system is known to be an unsafe money management practice, 39 percent of the respondents used this system. Eight percent of the respondents saved money in their own houses which is also not a proper way of doing so. Only two percent were saving their money through an official banking system in the study area. The problem in this connection is that all of the commercial banking offices are situated in urban areas but that the larger part of the community lives in the rural areas. Therefore, all concerned bodies and professionals should work on a money-financing system for rural communities and for poorer people.

Livestock Production
Livestock production is the most important source of livelihood after crop cultivation for rural communities in the study area and at large. Animal rearing is a basic source for the rural households' protein-rich diet which is obtained from milk, milk products, and meat. Also, livestock have proved to be basic to the farming activities in the study area. However, the capacity to keep livestock in rural areas is determined by different natural factors such as animal diseases, the shortage of grazing land, environmental degradation, and drought. Under this section, the number of Research on Humanities and Social Sciences www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-5766 (Paper) ISSN 2225-0484 (Online) Vol.10, No.5, 2020 6 livestock kept by the study population was assessed in terms of the financial resources and the livelihood supports of the study population.
In study area rural communities were measured in terms of criteria to determine whether a household was livelihood secure or not. Of these criteria, the first one is ownership of a number of oxen for farming activities and milk cows to support the household's family through the provision of milk and milk products. A rural householder keeping less than three livestock units/ cattle, would be considered as livelihood insecure. From this point of view, the number of livestock kept by each rural household in the study area was presented in Table 8. As the data show, only 16 percent of the study population responded as they reared more than three cattle in their households. Fiftynine percent (59%) of the study population had only one or two head of cattle at the household level. But 25 Percent of the study population replied that they had no cattle/livestock. Furthermore, farmers who said that they did not keep livestock and who indicated that they owned only one or two, were of the opinion that the main problem was a shortage of grazing land for cattle on account of farmland expansion over time.
As presented in Figure 3, the second major reason for limited cattle rearing in the study area was environmental degradation (28%). Another minor cause was the fear of animal disease. As a result of these factors, the number of livestock kept by the sampled rural population was diminishing in size with time. This implies that a currently large number of rural farmers lacks one of the important financial resources, namely animal rearing, because of the rapid population growth and environmental degradation in the Wolaita zone.

Income Levels of Households
Assessing the income level of rural households is one of the better alternatives to measure the financial capital of the study population. All of the economic activities of the individuals are measured in terms of the daily or monthly income rate of the person. In this regard, the rural households in this study were asked to indicate their daily income levels according to four categories.
According to the World Bank Report of 2014, the poverty line for Ethiopia at the time was below 1.90US$ per day and, based on this threshold, about 30 percent of the country's population was living below the poverty line. As per the data presented in Table 9, 52 percent of the daily income of the rural households was under the category of 10 to 15 Ethiopian birr or half a dollar (US) per day. This implies that the study population's daily income status was the worst in the even in comparison with the national figure. Table 9, also shows that more than nine percent (9.7%) of the study population earned 21 to 25 Ethiopian birr and above and 13.7percent earned 16 to 20 Ethiopian birr per day. Almost 77 percent of the study population's daily income was below one US, a serious consideration the light of the current exchange rate of the Ethiopian currency with the US dollar. In fact, the devaluation of the Ethiopian currency in terms of the international hard currency exchange rate has caused the price of imported items too sky-rocket, thus making the purchase of agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and insecticides very difficult. Thus increments in the daily income levels of the rural communities over time would be made valueless in the context of these problems.
To sum up, financial assets in terms of the daily income of the rural households in the study area were found to be very limited. This could be due to the effect of poor physical capital assets such as the small landholding size, infertile soils, the shrinking land size with the progress of time, the low vegetational coverage, the limited levels of human capital, and the poor credit and saving practices of the rural households.
As such, many of the rural householders have been faced with food security and livelihood security problems in the study districts and in the Wolaita zone generally.

CONCLUSION
The study revealed the major livelihood assets of the study area were categorized into three broad capital aspects, namely human, natural and financial. The lion's share of the source of labour for the rural households was family labour (76.3%) from the human capital aspect. Only 3.3 percent of the householder respondents used hired labour. This means that the majority of households in the study area depended on family labour to meet the labour requirements for their livelihood strategies.
From the physical capital aspect, land is the main economic asset of and livelihood sources for agrarian rural people but the size of the plots is so small proved to be serious problems in the study area. In the study area, nearly 44 percent of the rural households were found to possess farmland plots smaller than 0.25 hectares while 75 percent of the sampled farmers possessed plots that were smaller than one hectare.
Access to credit service providers and the practice of saving are good elements that contribute to and determine the financial capital status of the household head. From the total 300 surveyed households, about 60% of the respondents had received credit services from different financial institutions to mitigate their socio-economic problems. However, the remaining 40 percent had not been exposed to such a service. About 45 percent of the rural communities were using credit services from microfinance institutions, and only three percent were the recipients of those from commercial banks. This implies that a large number of rural societies in the study area had obtained credit services from informal financial institutions. Beside these, a large number of the rural households (56%) did not practise saving. From the financial capital aspect, and owing to the low economic returns Research on Humanities and Social Sciences www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-5766 (Paper) ISSN 2225-0484 (Online) Vol.10, No.5, 2020 in rural areas, saving is not a popular practice in the study area.
Livestock keeping is another source of financial capital in the study area. As the study shows,, the number of livestock currently kept by individual households in the Wolaita zone has been minimized as a result of various manmade and environmental problems. As the surveyed data show, about 16% of the respondents indicated that they rear more than three cattle, 59 percent only one or two cattle per household and 25% stated that they have no cattle/livestock at the individual household level.
As the survey report for the daily income rate shows, 52 percent of the income of the rural households in the study area amounts to half a US dollar per day. This figure indicates that large numbers of the respondents were at or below the poverty level, were living food insecurity, and had livelihood problems. Thus, for rural households, their financial capital source has declined enormously and it is a highly dwindling livelihood situation that they have to deal with.