Understanding Poverty and Survival Strategy among Ethiopian Pastoralists: The Boorana Pastoralists Perspectives

Poverty is often assessed using rigorous economic methods in the extant literature. Nonetheless, understanding poverty through supposedly rigorous economic methods per se is not sufficient. This study argues that Boorana pastoralist’s knowledge of poverty and its survival strategy provides foundations to understand poverty. The article was based on a dominantly qualitative mixed research approach to understand poverty from the perspectives of pastoralists in an African context (Ethiopia). Different participatory poverty assessment methods, like focus group discussions and interviews were used. The interviews were conducted with case study households and key informants. The data were analysed by descriptions of responses and narrations of cases. The results showed that pastoralists perceive poverty as a lack of livestock, low health, lack of money, lack of education and jobs. The findings also showed that climate change and variability, deterioration of pasture and water resources, lack of education and overutilisation of resources were the main causes of poverty. Boorana pastoralists perceive that diversification of income sources, crop cultivation, improvements to pastoral education, destocking and returning to forefathers’ cultural practices can be the main survival strategy of pastoralists against poverty. Therefore, there is a need to understand the dynamics of pastoral poverty for appropriate policy interventions.