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Livelihood strategies, environmental dependency and rural poverty: the case of two villages in rural Mozambique

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Abstract

This article attempts to explore the nexus between rural households’ environmental dependency, poverty and livelihood strategies. Households’ income from each livelihood activities formed the basis for categorizing households according to livelihood strategies. The principal component analysis, agglomerative hierarchical and the k-means cluster analysis were employed to determine the four livelihood clusters and to assign households to the identified livelihood strategies. Households’ environmental dependency, poverty and asset holding were compared across the strategies, and the determinants of livelihood choice were analyzed using multinomial logit model. The results indicate the existence of marked differences in environmental dependency, rural poverty and asset endowments across the livelihood groups. Household’s total saving, access to credit, production implements, business cost, exposure to agricultural shock determined household’s access to a more remunerative livelihood strategy. Incomes from each livelihood activities for the identified livelihood strategies were analyzed, and their implications were also discussed.

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Notes

  1. The term environmental income is preferred in the current paper for income from forest and non-forest environmental resources. Other papers (see e.g. Babulo et al. 2009) used the term forest and environmental income instead.

  2. Forest land is defined as land larger than 0.5 hectares and with a forest cover of 10 % or more (FAO 2000).

  3. Non-forest land is uncultivated land that does not comply with the above definition of forest land—e.g., fallow or pasture land (FAO 2000).

  4. The head count poverty index is the ratio between the number of poor households and the total number of households (Foster et al. 1984). A household is income poor if it earns an income less than 0.804 USD.

  5. The inverse Simpson diversity index was estimated as \(1/\left( {\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^n {s_i^2} } \right)\), where \(s_i^2\) is the share of the ith income source (Valdivia et al. 1996).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Øystein Juul Nielsen for providing the data. Thanks to three anonymous referees for their insightful feedback. I would also like to acknowledge Gilbert Wathum and Lindy Charlery for commenting on the earlier draft of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 23, 1958, Frederiksberg C, Denmark

    Solomon Zena Walelign

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Walelign, S.Z. Livelihood strategies, environmental dependency and rural poverty: the case of two villages in rural Mozambique. Environ Dev Sustain 18, 593–613 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-015-9658-6

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