Abstract

This study identifies the extent and determinants of rural poverty in southern Ethiopia, Doyogena district. The study used 150 households, using a household consumption expenditure approach by employing the FGT (Foster-Greer and Thorbecke, 1984) poverty index to determine the extent of rural poverty. The study’s result shows that the total head count index, poverty gag, and poverty severity indexes are 0.438, 0.25, and 0.1452 respectively. Moreover, based on the Binary Logistic regression model output of sample households, there is a significant difference in the poverty level among the poor and non-poor sampled households in terms of factors such as the size of cultivated land, remittances, dependency ratio, participation on off-farm activities, livestock ownership and use of improved seeds were significant up to10% probability level. Whereas, the age, education, and sex of sampled household heads access to extension service and credit service were not statistically significant. The finding reveals that most of the non-poor households are engaged in more than one livelihood options. On the other hand, income diversification can contribute a certain percentage to help poor households escape extern poverty and Non-agriculture sector should be developed to diversify the income sources of poor households.

Key words:  Determinant, extents, rural poverty, binary logistic model.