Analysis of rural household poverty status: The case of Woliso District of South West Shoa zone, Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia

In many developing and developed countries, program managers and policy makers who constantly dealing with poverty related interventions have to make best decisions from a wide range of program and policy options. Information for making such decisions must be based on sound data-based analysis. In order to make such analysis, there is a need to undertake empirical studies. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to assess the rural household poverty status. The district under study has 37 Kebeles and 5 Kebeles were selected using simple random sampling. From the sampled Kebeles, using probability proportional to size sampling method 140 households were selected. Both primary and secondary data were collected for the study. The primary data were collected from households through structured interview schedule. The secondary data were collected on agro climatic conditions, social services, availability of production and marketing facilities and population statistics. The t-test and χ2 - test were employed to test continuous and discrete variables respectively. Cost of Basic Need (CBN)) approach was followed to set the poverty line in the district. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) measure was employed to compute head count index (P0), poverty gap index (P1) and poverty severity index (P2). Accordingly, the food poverty line was found to be 1817.88 Birr per adult equivalent per annum which represents 81.21 per cent of the total share of the poor and the total poverty line was 2244 Birr. Poverty incidence, depth and severity of the district were found to be 38.5, 11.88 and 5.5 percent respectively. With regard to consumption expenditure, the maximum and minimum household expenditure per adult equivalent per annum represents 6081 and 985.58 Birr respectively with an overall average expenditure of Birr 2650 in the study area. The mean expenditure of the poor households was 1413.83 Birr while it was 3015.63 Birr for the non-poor households. Abbreviations: CBN- Cost of Basic Need, CBR- Crude Birth Rate, FGT- Foster-Greer-Thorbecke, WHO-World Health Organization.