Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8642-7325
Date Available
8-20-2025
Year of Publication
2025
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
Geography
Faculty
Dr. Nari Senanayake
Abstract
In drought-prone regions of Eastern Ethiopia, recurring droughts profoundly reshape everyday life in ways that deepen existing gendered inequalities. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Fedis district, including semi-structured interviews with women, project implementers, and government officials, as well as group discussions with community members, this study explores how women experience, navigate, and resist the gendered impacts of drought. By attending to the sociopolitical dynamics of drought and the development interventions that accompany it, I analyze how these forces restructure labor, land, food systems, and authority in ways that reproduce and exacerbate existing inequalities. Women’s coping strategies, ranging from begging and informal borrowing to early marriage arrangements, are often pathologized by neoliberal feminist development actors as cultural deficiency or backwardness. However, I problematize this as it obscures the deep structural inequities that garner such precarious coping strategies and positions communities as backwards and needing Western saving. Such coping strategies must instead be understood as constrained strategies for survival within systems of extraction, scarcity, and exclusion. In response, I propose decolonial feminist environmental justice futures as a path forward that envisions justice that is grounded in redistribution, collective care, and a refusal of neoliberal governance structures.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.432
Funding Information
Graduate Teaching Assistantship, University of Kentucky, Department of Geography, 2023-2025
Barnhart Withington Block Research Fund, University of Kentucky, Department of Geography, 2024
Recommended Citation
Lemma, Meron E., "THE PARADOX OF SURVIVAL: GENDERED FOOD INSECURITY, LABOR INEQUALITIES, AND COPING STRATEGIES DURING THE 2023/4 DROUGHT IN EASTERN ETHIOPIA" (2025). Theses and Dissertations--Geography. 111.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/111
Included in
African Studies Commons, Environmental Policy Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Human Geography Commons, International Relations Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, Other Geography Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Social Justice Commons, Women's Studies Commons
