Analysis of Poverty Dynamics and Vulnerability to Poverty Traps

In this chapter, two fundamentally related issues of current critical concern are selected for detailed examination, using the Borana pastoralist region as a case study to highlight the dynamics of pastoralist deprivation and vulnerability to poverty traps in the periphery. The chapter begins with the basic issue of the structural origins of pastoral poverty and vulnerability to poverty traps in the peripheral drylands. Changes in natural conditions and adverse factors internal to the pastoralist mode of life and response behavior are recognized. Nevertheless, it is argued here that the prevailing adverse trends of deprived well-being and growing pastoral household exposure to low-level equilibrium poverty traps in the peripheral pastoralist territories are linked to some deep-rooted structural factors. These are associated with human-made socio-political and economic conditions of prolonged marginalization and social exclusion, the negative impacts of inappropriate program interventions, and poor governance structures of the state. The chapter discusses the conditions of pastoral poverty traps and the abysmal failure of indigenous welfare institutions. A fairly innovative, detailed examination of evidence-based dynamic deprivation and household vulnerability to poverty traps is central to the chapter. The empirical findings are robust and clear. A growing percentage of the sampled Borana households are currently falling into a state of low-level equilibrium poverty traps, where a significant majority of them have possibly experienced an extreme condition of being in a state of permanent destitution. The rate of vulnerability to poverty trap is also very high, and this is even worse for the sampled female-headed households, where all of them are likely to be locked up in permanent destitution in the future, in the absence of genuine external support interventions that may help catapult them out of their current abysmal welfare conditions.