Urban Expansion and Its Impact on the Livelihood of Peripheral Farming Communities: The Case of Assosa Town, Benishangul Gumuz Region, Ethiopia

Abstract

Assosa town’s expansion program which had been experiencing a horizontal expansion starting from its historical expansion pattern currently implemented via expropriating peripheral land holders of earlier rural dwellers by solely decision of town administration and the investigation randomly targeted to per-urban areas from four peripheral kebeles surrounding of town. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess Urban Expansion and its Impact on Peripheral Farming Communities: The Case of Assosa town, BGR, Ethiopia Thus the study investigated the impact of urban expansion on the peripheral community livelihood in case of Assosa town. Questionnaire, survey, focus group discussion and key informants interviews were tools of data collection from 160 sampled households living in sampled kebeles via systematic random sampling technique and judgmental technique for FGD and interview. The results of the study indicated that there is infrastructural improvement, socio economic growth, rapid population growth and also socio-economic problems related to urban expansion in studied area. There is great spatial and temporal land use land cover modification more towards to build up land uses. The livelihood condition of per-urban community changed to non-agricultural form but there are policy and strategy gaps of expropriating, compensating for affected community in ground implementation. Landholder expropriated should be recompensed for equal socio-economic beneficially from urbanization and further skill-oriented training for new livelihood strategy and also accessing credit and rehabilitating strategy were recommended for affected community livelihood.