Livelihood diversification strategies among the Borana pastoral households of Yabello District, Oromia Region, Ethiopia

This study is aimed at identifying and describing the existing livelihood options and the determinants of the choice of the households’ livelihood strategies in the pastoral areas of Yabello District. The data for this study were obtained  from  a  survey  of  180  household  heads  selected  using  simple random sampling technique in the year 2016. The key informants interview and focus group discussion were undertaken to gather data having qualitative nature. The result of the descriptive statistics showed that the majority of the sample respondent households thus, 48.3% allocated all their labor force to pastoral and farming activities alone, while about 29.5% were involved in a combination of pastoral, farming and low return non pastoral nonfarm livelihood strategy and 22% work on pastoral, farming and high return non pastoral nonfarm combination of livelihood strategy. The result of the multinomial logit model revealed that family size, sex of household head, education status, livestock holding, access to credit, dependency ratio, access to extension, age of the household head and distance from the nearest have significant influences on household choice of livelihood strategies. Pastoral households have different access to resources and face different opportunities and challenges and thus choose different livelihood strategies calling for tailor made policy and development practice accordingly in line with their livelihood strategies choice. Key words: Livelihood strategies, non-pastoral nonfarm activities, multinomial logit, pastoralist.