Data on household use of organic resources including dung, wood and crop residues and their time use from Halaba district, Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region in Ethiopia. To capture seasonality households were, where possible, interviewed twice. A Baseline Data: collected in October 2016. Second Round Data: collected March/April 2017. In addition to organic resource and time use questions, the baseline survey has information on assets and land use, and the second has limited information on marketing.The shortage of organic resources in rural Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for improving long term energy, food and water provision is one of the region's greatest challenges. The Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region in Ethiopia (SNNPR) provides an excellent case study for transdisciplinary research on how community sustainability and resilience might be improved by better use of organic resources. Organic resources are scarce, with seasonality causing significant variation in available water across the year, while diverse cultural norms and institutional arrangements, framing access to land, water and energy, emphasise that the success and impact of interventions depends on complex interactions between what science makes possible and how decisions are made by individuals and communities. In a Nexus Network grant, engagement with farmers, householders and policy makers from Halaba District and the wider SNNPR identified key Nexus challenges as complex, multi-dimensional and inter-connected. The interaction between the use of organic resources for energy, water and food in the region is dynamic, extremely complex and highly spatially variable. As elsewhere in SSA, most of the rural population use solid biomass for cooking and heating, with wood, dung and crop residues the main energy sources. However, these resources are also crucial to long term sustainable food production and water use. Dung and crop residues provide organic fertilisers that improve water holding capacity of the soil. Demands on organic wastes for fuel and livestock feed reduce the use of dung and crop residues as soil amendments, which reduces biomass production and organic inputs to the soil.

Random sample of households drawn from list provided by local district authorities. Face-to-face interviews with trained enumerators with data recorded on Tablets, using ODK collect see opendatakit.org.