Abstract:
Holeta town’s expansion program which had been experiencing a horizontal expansion
starting from its historical expansion pattern currently implemented via expropriating
peripheral land holders of earlier rural dwellers by solely decision of town
administration and the investigation randomly targeted to per-urban areas like; Galgal
Kuyu, Tullu Harbu and Burka Welmera from five peripheral kebeles surrounding of
town. Rapid expansion of the town and in proportional expansion of town with community
livelihood is a serious issue for conducting research. Thus the study investigated the
impact of urban expansion on the peripheral community livelihood in case of Holeta
town. Questionnaire, survey, focus group discussion and key informants interviews were
tools of data collection from 313 sampled households living in sampled kebeles via
systematic random sampling technique and judgmental technique for FGD and interview.
The results of the study indicated that there is infrastructural improvement, socio
economic growth, rapid population growth and also socio-economic problems related to
urban expansion in studied area. There is great spatial and temporal land use land cover
modification more towards to build up land uses. The livelihood condition of per-urban
community changed to non-agricultural form but there are policy and strategy gaps of
expropriating, compensating for affected community in ground implementation. The
dislocation program implemented is not rehabilitative and negatively affected the
livelihood of the dislocated farming community. Furthermore, the study revealed that
children losses right of family inheritance in town administration. Landholder
expropriated should be recompensed for equal socio-economic beneficially from
urbanization and further skill oriented training for new livelihood strategy and also
accessing credit and rehabilitating strategy were recommended for affected community
livelihood.
