An Analysis of Urban Households Poverty and Forecasting its Average Exit Time: The Case of Selected Towns in Southern Ethiopia

Global organizations and development practionnaries aspire to see a world free of poverty; hence, set their objectives based on time. The foremost objective post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a theme of end poverty, with stated numerical targets of ending poverty and hunger by 2030. The accurate conceptualization and measurement of poverty is the first step in dealing with poverty reduction efforts. Forecasting the average poverty exit time is certainly valuable exercise to guide poverty reduction policies and strategies. The present study attempts to analyze urban household poverty and predict its average exit time in the Southern Ethiopia, which is relied on unidimensional poverty indices and average real gross domestic product. A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect the primary data from 508 randomly selected households following multistage random sampling techniques while the secondary data were collected from concerned offices and pertinent documents. Distributive Analysis Stata Package (DASP) was used to estimate various indices and curves of urban poverty. The study found that the proportion of income poor people in the regional study urbans is 28.36 percent with standard error of 0.0221, which is higher than the recent macrolevel reports, but lower than the microlevel evidences. This means that above 28 percent of the sample respondents are under the poverty line in the study urbans; thus, unable to meet at least the minimum per adult consumption expenditure per year required for basic necessities. The index is a signal for high incidence of absolute poverty at micro-level as compared to macro-level. The study further found that nearly four and half years are required to uplift the poor households of the regional urbans to the understated national poverty line of US dollar of 0.7 per day per adult equivalence, this is so only if the reginal average real gross domestic product growth rate of 10.4 percent is maintained.