IMPACT OF PUBLIC POLICY ON ALLEVIATING SOCIAL VULNERABILITY IN ETHIOPIA

Abstract

As a multidimensional challenge, social vulnerability is an important concept used to guide the formulation and evaluation of an interventionist policy. This study empirically appraises the impact of public policy on alleviating social vulnerability. The impact of political regime change on policy and institutional reforms is reviewed with more retrospective emphasis. Following a multi-stage sampling method, primary information was gathered via self-administered questionnaire, FGD, interviews, and personal observation from the target rural households located at four purposefully selected districts of Tigrai regional state of Ethiopia. To determine the resilience capacity of rural households, aggregated Livelihood Capacity Index (LCI) and Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) are constructed. As weak performance in one public sector may affect the performance of other sectors, the joint role of local public institutions in sustaining rural livelihoods and overcoming challenges encountered during the implementation of public policies, public interventions, and sector-based development programs are comparatively assessed. The study reveals clear policy gaps in identifying joint and achievable social protection oriented goals in both the national policies and sector-based development programs. The majority households who scored below average LCI and above average SVI are found to be underprivileged due to limited access to healthcare, education and agriculture services, drought-prone location, limited access to irrigation, lack of physical infrastructure and weak community-based social networks which are revealed as the root causes for livelihood vulnerability. The counterfactual impact of public intervention estimated using Propensity Score Matching suggests that the target households who had access to public intervention were found with 9.65% lower state of social vulnerability than they could score in the absence of the intervention. Taking all factors of social vulnerability as selection parameters, most of vulnerable households who would have been assigned as beneficiaries had no access to public intervention in spite of their state of defenselessness. Finally, this study suggests subsidization of basic agricultural inputs, launching universal adult education program, enhancing livelihood diversification strategies, empowering institutional integration, building self-resilience capacity of vulnerable households, and introducing evidence-based public interventions as alternative policy measures in response to effects of social vulnerability.