Livelihood security of rural households in Northern Ghana: do forests matter?
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Livelihood security of rural households in Northern Ghana: do forests matter? Franklin N. Mabe1 · Michael Ayamga1 · Misbawu Amadu1 Received: 30 July 2019 / Accepted: 10 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The study was conducted to analyze and ascertain the relevance of forest to the livelihood security of rural households in Northern Ghana. Primary data were collected from 240 sampled rural households from forest fringe communities in the West Gonja District and non-forest fringe communities in the Central Gonja District. Household livelihood security was measured using six security indices. The study results revealed that forest matters significantly in terms of livelihood security, with the forest livelihood zone recording higher livelihood security than the non-forest livelihood zone. The study established using Welch’s t-test a statistically and significantly higher livelihood security in the forest zone than in the non-forest zone. It is recommended that household livelihood diversification, geographical location and sustainable forest resource management are critical for policies that are aimed at alleviating rural poverty and guaranteeing rural livelihood securities. Keywords Ghana · Livelihood diversification · Livelihood security · Rural households · Sustainability
1 Introduction The rural economy plays a critical role in achieving the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. The rural sector, aside being home for about 80% of the world′s extreme poor (FAO 2014 and 2016; Newton et al. 2016; and De la O Campos et al. 2018) and 93.8% of Ghana′s extreme poor GSS (2014) rural areas serve as the life-blood of developing economies with 68% of the world′s population projected to live in urban areas, with approximately 90% of this occurring in Africa and Asia (Un 2018), sustaining rural development becomes critical. Rural households are generally highly deprived and more susceptible to * Franklin N. Mabe [email protected] Michael Ayamga [email protected] Misbawu Amadu [email protected] 1
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Faculty of Agribusiness and Applied Economics, Nyankpala Campus, University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana
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risks because of the dwindling output of agricultural (farm) activities (Agula et al. 2018). As a result, rural households gradually engage in non-farm activities to complement their livelihoods (Mabe et al. 2015). Non-farm rural activities, according to Lolig et al.(2014) and Sebak et al. (2019), tend to perform relatively better in terms of livelihood security than farm rural activities, constituting 35–50% of rural household incomes (World Bank 2017). Continually improving and securing the livelihoods of rural households is an indispensable requirement for sustainable rural development. Forests have gained considerable global recognition in terms of its contribution to alleviating poverty and to national income (Marie-Ange, 2019, Sebak et al., 2019, and Martin and Bruce, 2002). Forests, a
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