An assessment of the causes of malnutrition in Ethiopia: A ...

system, surveillance and monitoring in order to enhance the emergency response capability of
the country.
The FSS document states that the real possibility of closing the food gap at the
national level and the persistence of food insecurity at the household level implies the need to
transfer resources to the vulnerable population. However, these resource transfers should
involve shifting assistance from in–kind to financial flows, and shifting procurement of food
for relief distribution from imports to domestic supply. The NCFS identifies interventions that
make possible the transfer of resources, enhance the purchasing power of the poor, create offfarm
income generating activities, and overall boost the access of poor people to food within
three thematic areas – safety nets, disaster preparedness and emergency income
diversification, and rural agricultural entrepreneurship. The interventions in this regard are
asset creation through labor-based public works; household-level asset creation; human asset
development, and other related crosscutting interventions. These are the pillars of the safety
net program and related project initiatives under the NCFS (2003).
Livelihood strategies are part of the FSS, and were intensely addressed in the NCFS
document. A livelihood has been defined as ‘the activities, the assets and the access that
jointly determine the living gained by an individual or household,’ (Masefield 2000) or “what
people have and do in order to thrive and survive’ (CRDA 2001a). It is based on an inventory
of assets or potentials embracing the human, natural, financial, social, and physical.
Interventions that lead to income diversification are critical in reducing malnutrition and food
insecurity. Broadly, the categories of interventions in this regard are community development
funds; micro-enterprise development; access to income diversification inputs, agro-processing
development, and spatial labor mobility enhancing services.
Among the key interventions to secure livelihoods has been the use of Employment
Generation Schemes (EGS). EGS has evolved into employment-based safety nets (EBSN)
which received a ringing endorsement in the 2002 FSS. It has been government policy that all
food aid should be distributed on the basis of 80 percent EGS and 20 per cent gratuitous
distribution. In 1997, the DPPC issued guidelines for the management of the EGS (Robinson
2003). An EBSN ‘is a public works programme that provides employment at the same time as
building productive assets and minimizing the risk to vulnerable households of dipping below
the poverty line.’ In the 2002 FSS, it is stated “regular budgeted and multi-annually assisted
EGS/EBSN can respond to the huge chronically vulnerable populations’ needs and therefore
reduce emergencies to what they are normally and internationally defined as. EGS/EBSN
should be cash-based wherever the situation would allow.”
The performance of EGS in Ethiopia has been compared with the Employment
Guarantee Scheme in Maharashtra, India. Weaknesses of the Ethiopian EGS identified by
Middlebrook (2002) and others include the following: failure to enact and institutionalize the
EGS policy, poor planning capacity, lack of clarity over targeting, failure to build productive
assets, limited success in creating sustainable community assets, unreliable and late delivery
of resources, and insufficient funds for tools and management.
In Ethiopia, although food aid distribution in principle is calculated at 0.5 kg per
person per day, EGS schemes normally pay 3 kg per worker per day, on the expectation that
each worker has to feed a family (Robinson 2003). Self-targeting will work properly only if a
below-market wage is paid, but the rate must also be above the wage based on minimum
nutritional requirements. Raisin (2001a) argues that self-targeting below-market wages are
‘actually helping to keep beneficiaries in poverty.” She supports geographical community
targeting (which she calls a livelihood systems approach as compared with household
targeting, a livelihoods approach) because the household economy is not isolated from the
dynamics of inter-household relationships, especially in relation to land, oxen and labor.
Through, for example, price effects on non-beneficiaries, she argues, that relief targeting of
the poorest households encourages asset depletion among the relatively better-off. Geographic
targeting may bring its own risks of inclusion and exclusion; a study of food aid targeting in
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