Dataset for: Baseline Survey for the OFDA 2016 Mitigating Drought Impacts on Livelihoods in Mozambique through Resilient, Nutritious Sweetpotato Project in the South of Mozambique

This dataset was carried out as the baseline survey for the Mitigating Drought Impacts in Southern Mozambique Through Resilient, Nutritious Sweet potato Project that has been implemented in 13 districts in the southern of Mozambique, namely Matutuine, Boane, Moamba, and Magude in Maputo province, Guija, Mabalane, Massangena, Chigubo, Chiculalacuala, and Mapai in Gaza province, and Funhalouro, Mabote and Govuro in Inhambane province.Primary data of about 1,200 households were collected in all 13 project target districts. The sample size was estimated using the multistage sampling method. Overall, most of the household demographics were consistent with the findings from the household budget survey 2014/15 carried out by INE in the targeted areas. The number of household members was on average 5. Almost 58% of the households visited during this exercise had a child under 5 years, with an average of two years. The average age of the household heads was 50 years, and most of them had a third-grade education level. Overall, while about 36% of the household heads were women, almost 50% of the household members were female. The recurrent and extreme events such as floods, droughts, cyclones, extreme temperatures and others are generally the causes of the disruptions of the local cropping systems and in the end food and nutrition insecurity in most of the regions in Mozambique. To better continue to understand and build resilience to these drought related events, some of the climate change related events were evaluated. Overall, 79% of the respondents directly faced droughts related effects at least once in the last five years, 11% already faced the cyclones, and 10% were affected by floods. The districts Mabote (97%), Funhalouro (90%), Massangena (89%), and Chicualacuala (86%) had highest proportion of respondents who have suffered from droughts effects in the last five years. About 22% and 20% of respondents faced floods in Chigubo and Mabalane respectively. Moamba presented relatively higher proportion (17%) of respondents who also were affected by cyclones. In relation to the damage and effects caused by droughts, almost 44% of the respondents mentioned the loss of their crops, about 28% had their fields destroyed, and nearly 23% had lost their animals by death. Matutuine presented highest proportion of respondents with the crop loss (53%), while Boane had the highest proportion of the respondents with fields destroyed (45%). The district of Chigubo had the highest proportion of animals’ death (31%).