Factors affecting the implementation of urban agriculture at household level: The case of Holeta administrative town, Oromia, Ethiopia

Urban agriculture contributes to food security and food safety in two ways: first, it increases the amount of food available to people living in cities, and, second, it allows fresh vegetables and fruits and meat products to be made available to urban consumers. This study was attempted to investigate the factors affecting the implementation of UA at household level and the economic benefits it has in Holeta Town. From Holeta administrative town, two kebeles which have large number of households Goro Qerensa and Burqa Harbu were purposively selected. From each sampled kebeles, 30 households were selected purposively. Thus the study was conducted on 60 households (i.e. 36 males and 24 females). To gather the required information for the study, structured and pretested interview schedule was used. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (Percentage and Mean). The analysis disclosed that 68 per cent of the people lived in the town had enough land for producing different urban farm products for their consumption. However, only 23 per cent of the households had different vegetable productions, 7 per cent of the households had dairy production and 5 per cent of the households had poultry production for their family consumption and out of this, only 10 per cent of them supplied for the local market and they got an income of Birr one thousand to ten thousands per year. Out of the people lived in the town, 70 per cent spent Birr 250 – 500 (15 - 25% of their monthly income) for buying different vegetables, fruits, poultry and dairy productions for their family consumption. Around 63 per cent of the households did not believe that UA is improving the livelihood of people living in and around cities and they were not ready to implement it. So these indicates that households lived in the study town did not use UA not due to lack of enough land in their garden, but due to lack of awareness and knowledge about benefits of UA. Most of the households agreed that there were no defined policies which are converted to practice about the implementation of UA and the government & nongovernment bodies did not give them the awareness. Thus, some of the factors affecting the implementation of UA were having low attitude toward UA, lack of knowledge and awareness about the implementation and benefits UA, lack of defined policies which are converted to practice, lack of technologies about UA and so on. Based on the findings, the following recommendation was made: Environmental health education and awareness through dissemination of good practices in urban agriculture to farmers to enable them to generate both environmental and socioeconomic benefits have to be organized.