Ethiopia launched its interim poverty analysis report on Friday 16th March 2012 in the presence of the First Lady Azeb Mesfin, ministers, development partners and other stakeholders.

This interim report is based on the national Household Income, Consumption and Expenditure (HICES) and Welfare Monitoring Survey, which are undertaken every five years, and helps share key fresh analytical results with the Government, non-governmental organisations, development partners as well as the general public. “Five years is too long to wait to see what the country is doing” Ms. Samia Zekaria, Director General of the Central Statistical Agency (CSA), said explaining the need for more frequent surveys analysis, which had led to launch an interim report.

USD 2.2 million was provided for the survey process by the Development Assistance Group (DAG) through its Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Pooled Fund, which is managed by the UNDP. The DAG Pooled Fund also helped Ethiopia to learn best practices, through South-South cooperation, from other countries within Africa and Asia in data collection and sampling methods. This has led Ethiopia’s CSA to implement a methodology that reduces respondent fatigue by having less frequent but more engaging visits to households.

State Minister Abraham Tekeste (Ministry of Finance and Economic Development) said the decline in poverty is the result of government policy, but he recognized Ethiopia still faces a major challenge with 29% of the population below the poverty line. However, he stressed that Ethiopia was on track to meet the MDG 1 of reducing poverty by half by 2015.

The interim report looked at poverty indices by region, urban, rural and those areas that can be categorized as semi-urban. According to the findings, Ethiopia’s poverty urban inequality was highest during 2004/05 but has since declined due to government interventions, particularly pro-poor urban development and job opportunities for youth, according to MoFED consultant Dr. Tassew Woldehanna, associate professor in the Addis Ababa University. There is some increase in inequality in the rural areas but the presenter noted that this was not a significant rise and mostly due to the increase in income in the rural areas. There is a significant decline in rural and urban poverty incidence and gap in all the regions of the country.

He said the inequality in rural areas should not worry the government, but it was the urban inequality that should be concern as the consequence would be more serious. Lamin Barrow (Africa Development Bank) said the poverty reduction is attributed to growth and also highlighted that the pro-poor expenditure of the government has positively impacted the change.

The full report will be ready in a few month’s time and give a full picture of the characteristics of poverty as well as the income and non income dimension of poverty in Ethiopia.