Rural livelihood diversification and household well-being: Insights from Humla, Nepal
By Yograj Gautam, P. Andersen. 2016
392 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Diversification of livelihoods is a commonly applied strategy for coping with economic and environmental shocks and instrumental in poverty reduction. In this paper, we have assessed the role of livelihood diversification in household well-being in Humla, a remote mountain district in west Nepal. Employing the data produced from household surveys, we developed a composite household well-being index incorporating four components and 15 indicators, and measured the effect of diversification on it. Results suggested a uniform pattern of diversification in terms of the number of activities undertaken for livelihoods but a highly varying degree of resultant well-being across households. Analysis showed that well-being was not associated with diversification per se but rather on a households' involvement in ‘high return sectors’ such as trade or salaried job. Because involvement in these remunerative sectors is determined by various financial, social and human capitals, poor households were unable to combat the entry barrier and were prevented from getting access to them. In this way, livelihood diversification was found to have a highly skewed effect leading to inequality of income and well-being. This, in turn, is likely to risk depriving the poor households from exploiting new economic opportunities even in the future.
Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10df1962bffb5eefb72a5efd392eae19cdf02e7a
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Citations in the corpus
- Assessing farmer use of climate change adaptation practices and impacts on food security and poverty in Pakistan (2017, neutral): “…made an association between larger households and the ability to supply surplus labor to non-farm activities (Lanjouw and Lanjouw, 2001; Reardon et al., 2001; Rahut and Micevska Scharf, 2012; Gautam and Andersen, 2016) and the income generated could be invested in climate risk coping strategies.”
- Household Livelihood Strategies and Implication for Poverty Reduction in Rural Areas of Central Nepal (2017, background): “Education of HH head Schooling Years of HH head [7,54] HHs with a higher educated head are more likely to be involved in higher returning non-farm LSs”