IGAD Livestock Policy Initiative Poverty and Welfare Measures in the Horn of Africa

PREFACE This is the 8 th of a series of working papers prepared for the IGAD Livestock Policy Initiative (LPI). The IGAD Livestock Policy Initiative has been established by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in collaboration with FAO and with the financial support of the European Commission and its main objective is to enhance the contribution of the livestock sector to sustainable food security and poverty reduction in the IGAD region. The initiative will align itself with the core outputs of IGAD's programmes on policy harmonization, agriculture and the environment, regional integrated information systems and the IGAD livestock marketing information system. This paper is part of a project designed to provide standardised and cleaned spatial data for use by the IGAD LPI to help target the policy interventions identified by the project and to contribute to the evidence base for developing pro-poor livestock policies. It will also be used as baseline data from which the impact of policy interventions can be assessed and predicted. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the poverty estimates that are available in the IGAD region, in the context of analyzing the impact of livestock policies on poverty reduction. The poverty measures described include those derived from socioeconomic surveys and those derived from poverty mapping and modelling efforts. The more traditional approaches to measuring and mapping poverty rely on either economic measures, such as income or expenditure, or on a number of social indicators such as life expectancy, under-five mortality, nutritional status, level of education and so on, usually collected through household surveys. The level of information that can be extracted from socioeconomic or demographic surveys might not be sufficient for many policy and research applications. Researchers and policy makers therefore increasingly construct geographically disaggregated indicators that provide information about the spatial distribution of inequality and poverty within a country – so-called poverty maps. In addition to describing the different sources of poverty measures in the IGAD member states (Section 2), we provide an analytical comparison of such poverty measures for selected countries in the IGAD region (Section 3). Finally, we discuss the relevance of such measures for the livestock sector and the implication for poverty reduction strategies in the context of livestock development (Section 4). Disclaimer The designations employed and the presentation of material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Food …