Community based watershed development from sustainable livelihood perspective: a case analysis in north Gondar zone

In recent years, watershed degradation and its impacts on livelihood resource have become a key issue in Ethiopia. The main undesirable impacts on livelihood resources include land degradation, low agricultural productivity and rural poverty, which are interconnected. All these contribute to food insecurity and subsistence farming with a difficulty to break through the poverty trap. In order to break these intervened problems, community based watershed development is practiced. Therefore, the overall objective of this study is to investigate the main challenges and opportunities of community based watershed development with the eye of sustainable rural livelihood perspective in the case of Aba Gollem and Sommi watersheds, community based watershed development project. To meet this objective, 194 households from the two watersheds were selected by simple random sampling technique. The study reveals that the majority of natural resources have been improved in the watershed because of the practices and its technologies practiced in the area.