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In the absence of adequate support from formal social safety nets, rural households in Ethiopia have developed collective risksharing strategies to buffer them against adverse livelihood shocks, thus building their resilience capacities. Social capital and network based indigenous mutual support arrangements are the most important strategies that are institutionalized and widely practiced among rural households for centuries in Ethiopia to support households to cope with shocks. Nonetheless, resilience research and rural poverty alleviation policies have yet to fully recognize and embrace social capital as a tool to tackle poverty and vulnerability. Robust policy and academic studies on the role of indigenous welfare system with implications for social development policy making in Ethiopia are lacking. Using ethnographic techniques and simple descriptive statistics, we studied indigenous mutual support systems and how they shape the resilience trajectories of rural households against livelihood shocks within two selected PAs of Babille district of Oromia region. We found that mutual support practices are very effective in building coping resilience of households by smoothing consumption shocks. However, the traditional coping mechanisms often fail when the shock is systemic or covariate, when shocks last longer, and when a household has low level of human or finical capital.

Several initiatives by the Government of Uganda, Research Institutes and CGIAR centers have promoted the use of tissue culture (TC) banana technology as an effective means of providing clean planting material to reduce the spread of Banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) but its uptake is still low. We examine factors that constrain uptake of tissue culture banana planting materials in central Uganda by considering the cultural context of banana cultivation. Data were collected using eight focus group discussions involving 64 banana farmers and 10 key informant interviews and subjected to thematic analysis. Results showed that banana cultivars in the study communities were important for food, cultural practices and medicine. Cultivars supplied through TC were based on commercial considerations focusing on market value and household income and insufficient attention was given to their cultural importance. Farmers regard banana from TC planting material to be incompatible with their tastes and preferences for traditional food and drinks, culture and medicine. Furthermore, the plantlets are perceived as complicated to use, and farmers report requiring more knowledge and information on how to plant and maintain the plantlets on-farm. In these aspects, TC planting material does not align with cultural values linked to societal welfare. Future efforts aimed at controlling pests and diseases would benefit from more location-specific and holistic approaches that integrate cultural dimensions alongside planting material hygiene, quality and vigor.

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Effective management of plant health is fundamental for food and income security to meet the growing demands of local and global markets. This however requires farmers' adequate access to quality planting materials under the prevailing contextual and psycho-social factors. This study, anchored in the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technologies, unravels technology-acceptance factors that influence farmers' intentions to use banana tissue culture planting materials in the control of Banana Xanthomonas Wilt. Data were collected from 248 randomly sampled banana farmers using a structured questionnaire and analyzed using structural equation modelling to examine hypothesized paths in the uptake of banana tissue culture planting materials. Results show that farmer intentions to use tissue culture planting materials are dependent on two constructs: social influence and farmer innovativeness. However, social influence is the main predictor of intentions to use tissue culture planting materials. In particular, farmer innovativeness mediates facilitating conditions and social influence in predicting intentions to use tissue culture planting materials. Thus, this study reveals two factors that influence farmer intentions to use tissue culture planting materials: social influence and farmer innovativeness. The findings imply that social influence and farmer innovativeness are critical in disseminating novel agricultural technologies in Uganda and elsewhere.