For over 30 years, responses to food insecurity in Ethiopia were dominated by emergency food aid. While this saved lives, it often failed to protect livelihoods, and this became a growing concern. In response, the Ethiopian government revised its emergency food aid system in 2005 and launched the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), a more productive approach to providing a safety net to vulnerable populations. Furthermore, between 2010 and 2014, the Ethiopian government stepped up its efforts to address both relief and development, with harmonized donor support. Through this enhanced developmental approach, the PSNP provides a safety net for households that are both chronically food insecure and poor, and often affected by shocks.With an objective to assure food consumption, and simultaneously to protect and develop assets along with services, PSNP operates across widespread geographies and rural communities to determine eligibility to receive payments based on specific criteria. Such payments are made to households that can contribute to public works (labor); or, if labor is limited or impossible, unconditional support is provided. Through this infrastructure, PSNP contributes to a local enabling environment for community development.
Making a well-targeted program of this magnitude presents many challenges. Nevertheless, through IFPRI’s research into regular, fact-based monitoring of the allocation mechanism and appropriate targeting to assess change, this has impacted decisions within communities to ensure that PSNP works as it was intended and that it continues to provide a supportive, fair, transparent, and measured mechanism to overcome food insecurity in Ethiopia’s poorest households.
Lessons from this work have been incorporated into the program. For example, although PSNP has helped to improve household food security, it has not reduced stunting or wasting among participating children, according to an IFPRI-led assessment of the program’s impact on child nutritional status. The assessment drew attention to issues of diet quality and the fact that PSNP did not encourage children’s consumption of pulses, oils, fruits, vegetables, dairy products, or animal-source proteins. Most mothers had not had contact with health extension workers, nor had they received information on good feeding practices. Their water practices, such as boiling drinking water, were poor as well. These findings, along with work by other researchers, informed changes to the program. In the new (fourth) phase of the PSNP, nutrition is included as a major outcome indicator.
Read the full PSNP III report, Outcome Note and PSNP-HABP Final Report, 2014
Update: Latest publications on PSNP can be found here.
