Targeting food security interventions in Ethiopia: The productive safety net programme

Abstract

In Ethiopia, as in many other African countries, there is a pressing need to improve household food security. An emerging consensus suggests that this is most easily accomplished through two development strategies with two complementary dimensions: investments that facilitate income generation and asset accumulation, discussed elsewhere in this book, and interventions that protect the poorest from hunger, prevent asset depletion, and provide a platform for the growth interventions. Because resources for such interventions are limited, there needs to be a mechanism for allocating these. In this chapter we consider this issue in the context of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), a federal government program implemented almost entirely through government systems with harmonized donor support. Before 2005, the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) launched emergency appeals for food aid and other forms of emergency assistance almost annually. Although these succeeded in averting mass starvation, they did not banish the threat of further famine and did not prevent asset depletion by marginally poor households affected by adverse rainfall shocks. In response, the GoE and a consortium of donors implemented a new response to chronic food insecurity in rural Ethiopia. Rather than mounting annual appeals for assistance and ad hoc distributions, they established the PSNP. The PSNP "provides transfers to the food insecure population in chronically food insecure woredas in a way that prevents asset depletion at the household level and creates assets at the community level" (FDRE 2004, 2). Unlike the annual emergency appeals, it was conceived as a multiyear program to provide recipients with predictable and reliable transfers. Most benefi ciaries undertake public works. From 2005 to 2007, these paid benefi ciaries either Ethiopian birr (ETB) 6 per day (increased to ETB 8 in 2008 and ETB 10 in 2010) in cash or three kilograms of cereals for work (depending on where they lived) on labor-intensive projects building community assets. A smaller number of benefi ciaries received unconditional transfers called direct support. Initially, the PSNP was complemented by a series of food security activities called the Other Food Security Programme (OFSP). The OFSP included access to credit; assistance in obtaining livestock, small stock or bees, tools, and seeds; and assistance with water-harvesting schemes, soil conservation, and improvements in pastureland. In some cases, benefi ciaries were provided with subsidized credit to purchase "packages," combinations of agricultural inputs sometimes based on a business plan developed with support from the extension service. In 2009 the OFSP was redesigned and renamed the Household Assets Building Program (HABP), with an emphasis on increased contact and coordination with agricultural extension services. As discussed by Gilligan, Hoddinott, and Taffesse (2009) and Berhane et al. (2012), the PSNP-where implemented according to program design- has increased food security. Participants who have received public works employment for fi ve years have increased their food security by just over one month and their livestock holdings by 0.4 tropical livestock units (TLUs). There are synergies between the PSNP and the OFSP/HABP. Having both the PSNP and the OFSP/HABP increased food security by 1.53 months and livestock holdings by 1.001 TLUs. Although these are important impacts, they do not tell us whether the households that obtained these benefi ts were the intended benefi ciaries. Were they poor, food-insecure households? Or did elite capture mean that benefi ts went to the better off? To answer these questions, we examine targeting of the PSNP in two ways: (1) through an assessment of whether it was targeted as designed and (2) how well it compares to other programs internationally.