Research on the Impact of Disaster Risk Management Interventions in Humanitarian Programmes on Household Food Security: The Case of East Africa, Ethiopia, Amhara Region, North Wollo Zone

North Wollo Zone is one of the 11 zones in Amhara Regional State of Ethiopia, East Africa. The zone is among the most-disaster prone areas of the country and drought, crop pests, flood, frost, and hailstorms have repeatedly struck it for many years. The livelihoods of the households of the zone depend on subsistence farming. Small landholdings, environmental degradation, and population pressure have created additional complications.

For the last three decades, communities and governments have been working in collaboration with humanitarian development partners to ensure food security at the household level in the study area. But due to the lack of intentional and integrated Disaster Risk Management (DRM) with household food security, households remain unable to achieve food self-sufficiency. This gap is leading communities, governments and humanitarian partners to expend resources repeatedly on the same issues and locations without addressing the root causes of food security. After three decades of intensive food security, food aid and rehabilitation interventions in the area, households’ food security is still susceptible to slow onset hazards, such as a shortage of rainfall.

In principle, challenges lead to solutions but due to the dependency syndrome that inadvertently comes with humanitarian assistance, households can’t find their own coping mechanisms. Humanitarian assistance and remittances are among the main coping strategies of households for disaster risks.
Due to the efforts of the government and its humanitarian partners on intensive life saving emergency relief, drought and other hazards have not triggered famine for the past decade. Instead, the magnitude and intensity of these natural events have been mitigated.

The other aggravating factors for food insecurity and vulnerability have been the low level of personal savings and the lack of household assets and possessions. In developed economies the occurrence of a disaster risk may not directly affect household food security. Instead, disasters typically affect the savings and assets of a household. In contrast, in the study zone a disaster risk has direct implications on household food security, as the level of savings is insignificant to absorb shocks.

In the study area, the existence of local institutions, norms, indigenous knowledge and early warning systems can be used as tools to bring food self-sufficiency to the household level.

The research focuses on tackling the dependency of households on humanitarian assistance by integrating such assistance with clear and sustainable empowerment strategies. It analyses the need to formulate a government-level “Big Programme” that emphasizes household food security and resilience and which has both a defined and specific time frame and operational scope. Additionally, this study contributes to further research in the field of food security and encourages the continued formulation of strategies and policies that focus on the relationship between disaster risk management and household food security in the world’s least developed countries (LDCs).