Abstract

Shishay Kahsay and Messay Mulugeta

The study was conducted in Tigray, Laelay Maichew woreda. Different concepts and empirical findings are profoundly organized and presented. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. The primary data was collected using survey questionnaires, key informant interview, focus group discussion and observation. One hundred fifty households were randomly selected for the survey type while secondary data were collected from published and unpublished materials. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and multiple linear regressions. To undertake regression analysis, linearity, normality and homoscedasticity tests were employed. For the multiple regression analysis, total calorie availability/adult equivalent/day was taken as dependent variable and 16 explanatory variables were taken. Off these variables only five variables are found to be significant at 95% confidence level and the selected explanatory variables explains 39.9% of the variation in calorie availability. In general, age of household head, use of improved seeds, number of TLU/household, number of adult equivalent/household and land size in hectare were found to be significant at 95% (α=0.05) confidence level. The government should exhaustively work on promoting irrigation, providing credit and subsidize the farmers to solve the problem of food insecurity.