Attachments
Introduction
Long-term provision of aid to people in need of assistance has been associated with fear of creating a dependency syndrome. The primary concerns are that beneficiaries will lose the motivation to work to improve their own livelihoods after receiving benefits, or that they will deliberately reduce their work efforts in order to qualify for the transfer. Governments and development actors use such concerns to justify introducing safety net programs in the form of labor-intensive public works, which aim to support chronically food-insecure households in developing countries. This paper strives to answer the question of whether long-term recipients of aid develop a dependency syndrome, reducing their own efforts to improve their livelihoods, by analyzing the behavior and livelihoods activities of food aid beneficiary households in rural Ethiopia, where food aid has been provided every year for over two decades.