Analysis of the challenges facing agro-pastoral households in Beletweyne, Somalia

Agro-pastoral households in Somalia’s Hiiraan Region combine rain-fed and riverine cultivation with livestock keeping and face drought, flooding, input scarcity, weak services, thin markets and insecurity simultaneously. Studies of these constraints usually rank them by mean severity or by the percentage of households naming them, treating constraints as mutually exclusive and unable to say how many households would remain unaffected if a given set were removed. This article applies Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency (TURF) analysis, a portfolio-optimisation technique from marketing science, to identify the smallest set of challenges that jointly reaches the largest share of agro-pastoral households. The design builds on a household survey of 96 households in three villages of Beletweyne District. TURF analysis is formalised in nine reproducible steps, from binarisation and coverage indicators to integer optimisation, bootstrap inference and sensitivity analysis, showing how outputs are read. The approach shifts challenge assessment from what is most common to what, in combination, covers most households, and offers a transparent evidence base for sequencing interventions in fragile settings.