Situation analysis and UCPV assessment, Urban and peri-urban female youth, March 2010

UNDERLYING CAUSES OF POVERTY ANALYSIS REPORT

RESOURCE POOR FEMALE YOUTH IN URBAN AND PERI-URBAN AREAS (VULNERABLE TO HIV/AIDS)

1. INTRODUCTION

This report focuses on CARE Ethiopia’s impact group resource poor urban and peri-urban female[1] youth vulnerable to HIV and AIDS and specifically on the underlying causes of poverty assessment and analysis for the impact group, conducted in 2009. This analysis is the starting point for the design of a program that aims to have a long-term, sustainable impact on addressing urban youth poverty. The selection of this impact group recognizes that Ethiopia’s is predominantly a young population, and that as in many developing countries, there is rapid urban and peri-urban growth. This means that there are increasing numbers of youth growing up in urban and peri-urban areas. Whilst CARE Ethiopia’s past interventions and focus has largely been in rural areas, where around 80% of Ethiopia’s population live, we recognize that trends in urbanization, in rural-urban migration and in rural environmental degradation and potentially, climate change, mean that increasingly, youth populations will be concentrated in urban areas. This presents both opportunities and challenges for the development of Ethiopia that need to be recognized and faced up to.

The underlying causes of poverty and vulnerability (UCPV) assessment and analysis, conducted in 2009 aimed to learn more about the current situation of urban and peri-urban youth – who are the poorest youth in urban areas, what are they vulnerable to and why, are there differences between the situation of youth in urban or peri-urban areas, what are the challenges they face? This report describes the findings of the assessment. Following the assessment, CARE Ethiopia recognized that the impact group is still probably too wide a population for us realistically to be able to program for, and that we need to further define the impact group. A first step has been to focus on female youth ie. the program will work primarily, but not exclusively, with resource-poor urban and peri-urban female youth. This decision has been made based on a number of considerations: i) the relative vulnerability of female youth, as highlighted in our assessment, other studies and various vulnerability statistics ii) to align this impact group with CARE Ethiopia’s strategic focus on women and girls’ empowerment, and with the other impact groups[2] which explicitly target women and girls, and iii) the strong belief that by working with and through urban/ peri-urban female youth the ‘multiplier effect’ i.e. the development of female youth’s families and future children, will lead to a greater impact on the future development of Ethiopia.

Other strategic issues being considered in relation to the impact group’s definition at this point include:

  • What should be the age range for ‘youth’? We are currently using the government’s definition of 15 to 29 years, but we also appreciate that many of the girls who migrate to urban areas, and who end up being amongst the most vulnerable, fall within the 10 to 14 age group (see below).
  • What is our definition of ‘urban’ and ‘peri-urban’ and does this agree with the government’s definition? Should we work only with ‘urban’ youth given that over a 10 to 15 year time period, many currently ‘peri-urban’ areas will become ‘urban’ (at the same time as many currently ‘rural’ areas will become ‘peri-urban’).

We recognize that there are many gaps in the analysis, and that whilst moving forward with program design, we need to do additional desk and probably field work, to further strengthen our analysis for the impact group. This process is being led by CARE Ethiopia’s program design team for youth and is still ongoing.

CARE’sUnifying Framework[3]

CARE’s Unifying Framework (UF) brings together a number of different programming concepts and principles into one framework that can help to understand and analyze the structural causes of poverty and vulnerability – causes that are often interlinked and reinforce each other. The framework recognizes that poverty and vulnerability can be manifested in human conditions – (lack of) access to resources and services and livelihoods’ opportunities, social positions – social relationships and social/ cultural norms that discriminate or support inequality, and the enabling environment – the political, and institutional formal and non formal structures and systems that enable or hinder rights fulfillment and access to justice. CARE believes that unless we understand each of these different, often interrelated aspects of poverty, we will not design programs that can bring real, lasting change. The UF also recognizes that there is a ‘hierarchy’ of causes of poverty and vulnerability: there are immediate causes, for example due to a sudden disaster or shock; there are intermediate causes, such as a lack of access to assets, income, resources or services that can help withstand shocks; and there are underlying or root causes that underpin poverty and vulnerability such as institutionalized discrimination or societal attitudes and norms that sustain abuse or misuse of power and prevent certain groups from claiming and fulfilling their rights.

2UNDERLYING CAUSES OF POVERTY ASSESSMENT PROCESS

The pilot UCPV assessment was completed in Bahr Dar town (pop x), the capital of Amhara region in February/ March 2009. A follow up assessment took place in April 2009 in Hamusit and Alem Bir towns – ‘peri-urban areas’ somex km from Bahr Dar, also in Amhara region. The second assessment aimed to build on the Bahr Dar findings and identify the differences and/or similarities of poverty/vulnerability between urban and peri-urban areas. The objectives of the assessment were[A1]:

1)To deepen our understanding ofthe causes of poverty and vulnerability of urban and peri-urban youth and to identify sub-set populations of the most vulnerable youth.

2)To identify the potential target groups[4] and stakeholders[5] that we need to work with to achieve change for urban and peri-urban youth.

3)To generate lessons for CARE Ethiopia and other country offices about how to undertake similarassessments and analyses in future.

The assessment process included:

  • Desk review conducted at national level to review the literature, identify policies and programs affecting urban and peri-urban youth and begin to identify key stakeholders.
  • Task Forceestablished with 15 CARE Ethiopia cross-project, multi-disciplinary staff to lead the process of planning and conducting the assessments
  • Key questions and toolsdeveloped. Key questions were translated into Amharic. Tools included: Vulnerability analysis, Power analysis, Institutional analysis, Lifeline case study
  • 3-day training conducted for participating staff (including CARE Ethiopia and partner staff) on PRA approaches, key questions and tools.
  • 5-day pilot assessmentconducted in Bahr Dar (on the urban/ peri-urban youth impact group).

Based on the pilot lessons, the field assessment adopted the following process:

  • Current and potential strategic partnersjoined the assessment teams in each location.
  • Stakeholders meetingheld with representatives from government and other agencies working with the impact group to introduce the program approach, the impact group and the purpose of the assessment, to plan the assessment and inform the field work through stakeholders’ perspectives.
  • Conducted key informant interviews with stakeholders and reviewed relevant local policies, studies, documents etc.
  • Refined the key questionsfor the field work and developed field guidelines for the assessment teams, including facilitators’ guide, tools and data analysis guidelines.
  • Conducted field work using combination of FGDs, KIIs and case stories
  • Analysed datathrough team reflection in the field using the unifying framework to organize findings
  • Heldfeedback meetings on the initial findings of the assessments and analysis. This was done in Bahr Dar a few months after the assessment with CARE staff, government and NGO/ INGO participants.

Field work teams and methodology

Following the Bahr Dar pilot assessment, the assessments in Hamusit and Alem Bir were conducted byaninterdisciplinary team, which included CARE Ethiopia UCPV task force members, CARE Ethiopia field staff and community facilitators from different projects and disciplines and staff from peer and partner organizations. The aim was not to conduct a statistically valid study, as in a baseline assessment, but to focus on collecting qualitative information about the situation of urban and peri-urban youth – including their human conditions, social positions and the legal and institutional frameworks and structures that affect them.

The urban/ peri-urban youth assessment was led by the Senior Governance Advisor in CARE’s Program Development and Quality Support (PDQS unit). Partner staff included staff from Child Fund, staff from the Women’s Affairs Bureau in Bahr Dar and two female youth Peer Educators from CARE’s Getting Ahead project in Bahr Dar who had also participated in the pilot assessment.

The methodology for the Bahr Dar and Hamusit and Alem Bir assessments included:

  • Focus group discussions(FDGs)and case studies with: women and female youth, male youth, parents of youth, commercial sex workers, daily laborers, youth living with HIV, and chat chewers
  • Key informant interviews (KIIs) with staff from HAPCO, Bureau of Women’s Affairs, Bureau of Youth and Sport, Bureau of Labour and Social Affairs, and kebele micro-finance

In Bahr Dar, 9 FGDs and 13 KIIs were held with 103 respondents (59 female and 44 male) in three kebeles and in Hamusit and Alem Bir, 6 FDGs and 5 KIIs were conducted with a total of 53 respondents (27 female and 26 male[A2])[RS3] Two stakeholders’ meetings were also conducted in Hamusit and Alembir towns.Most of the analysis was done by the assessment teams ‘in the field’using the unifying framework as a guide. Each day the teams identified emerging issues, issues that needed cross-checking and/or gaps in information to be followed up the next day, and decided on the FGDs or KIIs needed to triangulate information. The next day’s findings were then used to review and deepen the analysis.

Study Limitations

The study started off with a very broad remit – purporting to look at all the potential vulnerable groups of urban/ peri-urban youth, both male and female, and all the potential underlying causes of poverty and vulnerability e.g. related to livelihoods, social status and relationships, the institutional environment and so on of all these groups. This led us to identify a large number of vulnerable sub-groups, both male and female, and we did not have time to look in detail at the situation/ stories of all the groups; for example, the team did talk to commercial sex workers, but not to domestic workers; we talked to male daily laborers, but not to female daily laborers; we did not talk to ‘brokers’ or to employers of commercial sex workers. Some of the findings were not adequately disaggregated e.g. between male and female youth or between rural youth who have migrated to urban areas and ‘native’ urban youth. We had planned to conduct case stories where we ‘traced’ migrant youth back to their home areas but this was not done and the team did notlook in detail at the linkages between rural, peri-urban and urban areas, particularly with regard to rural-urban migration of youth. Further analysis also probably needs to be done to understand in more detail the differences between the poverty drivers for peri-urban and urban youth, and it is arguable whether findings from Bahr Dar and those peri-urban areas are representative of other urban and peri-urban settings such as Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, Dukam etc.Although we have not yet done field work in other areas, a review of the literature and discussions with other stakeholders suggests that at least some of the findings may be generally applicable.Finally, the original desk review did not adequately highlight all of the relevant literature, particularly the research done by Population Council – this information would have been useful in refining the impact group and key questions prior to the assessment,

3.FINDINGS

3.1BACKGROUND

Urban youth demographics

Ethiopia has an estimated population of almost 79 million and a population growth rate of 2.6% per year. Although it remains a predominantly rural country, with over 80% of the population still living in rural areas and largely dependent on agriculture, the urban population is growing rapidly – at a rate of 4% per year[6]. Towns across the country that were relatively small, rural centers 10 or 15 years ago are now fast developing peri-urban areas. Similar with many other developing countries in Africa, Ethiopia’s population as a whole is a young population. TheCSA[7] census in Ethiopia puts the population under 15 at around 33.2 million, approximately 45% of the total population and theyouth population aged 15-29,at around 20.9 million, approximately 28% of the total population. Of the total youth population (15-29), the urban youth populationnumbers around 4.7 million, approximately 22% of the total.

The reasons for the high population growth rates overall include a sharp reduction in the under-5 mortality rate over the past 20 years[8] coupled with a still-high total fertility rate.[9] In addition, there is still a high rate of early marriage and early childbearing in Ethiopia – some 40% of women surveyed in 2005 had had their first child below the age of 18 and about 16% of women between 15 and 19 years are either pregnant or already mothers[10]. However, there are signs of changing trends in relation to fertility particularly in Addis Ababa, and amongst young women and urban women generally. For example:

  • Addis Ababa shows a relatively higher reduction in the total fertility rate than elsewhere
  • Younger women aged 20-24 are marrying later than women who were the same age in the 1980s
  • Urban women, aged 20-49 are marrying later than rural women (19.4 years compared to 16.1 years)
  • Contraceptive prevalence in urban areas is much higher than in rural areas (47% compared to 11%)
  • Young women and men aged 15-19 envision a much smaller ideal family size than those over 25 (3.3 children vs. 5.1 for women and 3.8 children vs. 5.8 for men)[11]

Whilst countries can enjoy a ‘demographic dividend’ or ‘bonus’ when a relatively higher population of working-age adults (15 to 59) is able to support relatively smaller populations of children and the elderly, this will only happen if most of the working-age population is actually economically active[12]. If the youth population is not economically productive e.g. is unskilled and unemployed, this can threaten rather than enhance national stability and economic security. In Ethiopia, a significant percentage of the urban and peri-urban youth population is living in poverty and is vulnerable to a number of negative social, economic, environmental, health and educational outcomes.

Definitions of ‘youth’

The National Youth Policy of Ethiopia defines youth as people between ages 15 and 29 years old (MYSC 2004). In terms of defining the age range of a broad youth impact group, it seems to make sense for CARE Ethiopia to adopt the policy definition of youth as “young people, male and femalebetween the ages of 15 and 29”. Using this age definition, in Amhara region specifically, where the UCPV assessment was conducted,around 28% of the population is between 15 and 29 years old, whilst the region’s urban youth population is around 872,000 (52% of whom are female)[13].

During the UCPV assessment in Bahr Dar town, male youth, parents and youth organizations put youth in the age bracket from 18 to 35 years. However, female youth described themselves as being ‘young women’ or ‘youth’ as opposed to ‘girls’ from the age of 15. There may be many reasons for the difference in perception; for example, girls are generally transitioning into puberty between 12 and 15 and are no longer seen as girls; girls are generally expected to take on household and other ‘adult’ responsibilities from a younger age than boys; related to that, girls generally have less leisure and recreation time than boys and are possibly expected to ‘grow up’ earlier. Similarly, male ‘youthfulness’ may continue for longer than females, especially if the young man is not married, or is unemployed[14].

Therefore, whilst we may use the broad age definition it is important to understand the social norms and perceptions that define ‘youthfulness’ and determine when someone has transitioned from a ‘child’ to a ‘youth’ or from a ‘youth’ to an ‘adult’. For example, in addition to the age-based classification, parents and young people in Bahr Dar also described a ‘youth’ as someone who is ‘lacking clarity’, ‘doesn’t have a clear vision of the future’ or ‘is drawn to temporary attractions’. For female youth in particular, non-age related and socially constructed definitions of ‘youth’ for example related to her physical development or ‘marriageability’, may be as important or more important than age in determining who are the most vulnerable and marginalized sub-groups of young people that should be CARE Ethiopia’s ‘impact group’.[15]