Impacts of productive safety net program on household asset building, food security and annual income in Sidama zone, Southern Ethiopia

This study was conducted with the aim of identifying the impacts of the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on household food security, asset accumulation and annual income. The intervention areas of the project are in improving the overall livelihood of rural poor households. Even though the project has been implemented since 2005 in Ethiopia, its impact on food security, asset accumulations, and household income have not well studied. Both primary and secondary data were collected and analyzed. The primary data was collected from 154 PSNP beneficiaries and 174 non-beneficiaries. Secondary data was used from previous related literature and office reports. Descriptive statistics and econometric model of propensity score matching (PSM) were used to analyze the collected data. The result of the descriptive statistics showed that there are significant mean differences between PSNP beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries in terms of the number of months with food shortage, educational status, contact with development agents, and family size. Since the project gives priority for female-headed households, more than half of beneficiaries (64.94%) were female-headed households. Moreover, the mean difference of outcome variables for samples before matching the households for daily caloric intake per adult equivalent (t=6.68), asset accumulations (t=7.05) and annual income (t=5.44) was statistically significant between PSNP beneficiaries and non-beneficiary based on the results of t-tests. Similarly, the result of PSM confirmed that the ATT of PSNP beneficiary households increased the total calorie intake per adult equivalent by 738.27 Kcal which was significant at a 1% significance level. Similarly, there was a statistically significant mean difference between the beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries groups regarding asset accumulations and annual income in birr of 29652.7 and 26732 birr respectively. The sensitivity analysis result showed that the impact results estimated by this study are insensitive to the unobserved selection bias of gamma value 3.5. Therefore, since the impacts of the project were found positive, it is better to widen the implementation of the project to other food prone areas of Ethiopia.