Rural Household Multidimensional Poverty in Degu’a Tembien District, South Eastern Zone of Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract

Poverty is one of the most multifaceted problems, in which a single indictor
such as income or consumption is not adequate to show the comprehensive
picture of poverty among households. Multidimensional poverty approach
helps to show the actual realities of households in rural areas. This study
aimed at assessing household multidimensional poverty focusing on a set of
household capabilities and functionings in Degu’a Tembien District in Tigray
Region, Ethiopia. Cross-sectional data were collected from randomly selected
420 households from six rural Kebeles (villages) of the District to estimate
multidimensional poverty. Findings showed that household’s incidence of
deprivation was generally high and widespread in landholding, livestock
ownership, decision making on income, access to electricity, energy use for
cooking, and access to sanitation. Results also showed that 60% of households
were multidimensional poor while the average intensity of multidimensional
deprivation, which showed the share of deprivations each poor household’s
experiences on average, was 58%. Overall, a Multidimensional Poverty Index
of 0.35 was found for the rural households in the study district. This result
implies that rural development poverty reduction program should be focused
on targeted interventions on the indicators that have higher deprivations.