article · Discover Sustainability
Urban agriculture often receives limited attention from policymakers, urban planners and researchers in Ethiopia, despite ongoing debate surrounding its effectiveness in addressing household poverty. An investigation conducted in Bahir Dar city examined how agricultural activities in urban settings influence poverty mitigation. Based on survey data gathered from 240 randomly selected participants across various sub-cities alongside secondary sources, the analysis evaluated household poverty through indices and logistic regression modelling. The findings indicate that urban agriculture contributed to an 80.3 percent role in alleviating poverty locally. Furthermore, several specific household factors significantly reduced the likelihood of experiencing poverty, including access to family labour, higher non-farm per capita income, cooperative membership, the utilisation of modern agricultural inputs, and primary or secondary educational attainment. Integrating urban agriculture into broader urban governance and development policies could strengthen municipal poverty reduction strategies.
Rapidly expanding cities face persistent poverty challenges, yet urban food production is often overlooked by municipal planners. Demonstrating that farming within city limits significantly alleviates poverty provides evidence for municipal authorities and development agencies. Incorporating agricultural initiatives into urban planning can improve household income resilience, encourage cooperative membership, and guide targeted support such as educational programmes and input access for vulnerable urban populations.
The abstract reflects applied socio-economic field research rather than a direct technological product. However, the identification of modern input use and cooperative membership as key factors reducing poverty points to commercial opportunities for agricultural input suppliers, service providers, and cooperative management organisations operating in urban areas. These applications remain at an early development stage, as commercial adoption depends on municipal policy shifts that officially recognise and support urban farming activities.
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Urban agriculture is neglected by policy makers, researchers and urban planners in Ethiopia in general and in research area in particular. Moreover, there are controversial ideas concerning its role in household poverty alleviation. In a modest attempt to fill in the research gap observed in this area; the present study was carried out at Bahir Dar city. The objective was to analyze the role of urban agriculture in mitigating urban poverty. The study employed primary data collected by using structured questionnaires from 240 sample respondents selected randomly using proportional to size technique in the respective sub-cities and secondary data sources. The data were analyzed using poverty index, descriptive statistics and logistic regression model analyses. The finding depicted that the poverty alleviation role of urban agriculture was found to be 80.3% in the study area. The result of logistic regression displayed that family labor, non-farm per capita income, membership to cooperative, modern input use and educational level (primary & secondary) had significant and negative impact on the probability of being poor in their marginal effect. Therefore, urban agriculture can play a significant role in poverty reduction, and the government should make it an integral part of urban policy.
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DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04290-7
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