The impact of urban expansion on the livelihood of peri-urban farmers

The objective of this book was to examine the impacts of urban expansion against agricultural land and change in the livelihood of farming communities at the urban fringe in Woldia Town. In order to find out the problems, the research made use of both primary and secondary data sources. The primary data for the study were obtained mainly through questionnaire administrated to 183 sample farmer households systematically selected from 871 impacted farmer households and through structured interview, FGDs and personal observation as well as detail field surveys and checks. Maps and figures also used to make the study illustrative. Accordingly, pairs of remotely sensed data i.e. aerial photographs of the 1965 and 1986 together with GPS readings for the year 1990 and 2008 were used to identify urbanized areas and to quantify urban expansions for periods dating from 1965 to 2008. Details of land use/land cover change dynamics updated by intensive field surveys and checks have been also used. Moreover, descriptive statistics such as percentage, cross tabulations, cumulative frequencies, Mean, standard deviation, range as well as bar graphs, and diagrams have been used to analyze the data.