Seyoum Tezera

Capacity Building Helps Pastoral Women Transform Impoverished Communities in Ethiopia

Diversification of income-producing activities provides greater resilience to drought. Poverty, drought, and hunger devastate people on Africa’s rangelands. We used an action-oriented approach from 2000 to 2004 to build capacity among thousands of pastoralists to diversify livelihoods, improve living standards, and enhance livestock marketing. The process included collective action, microfinance, and participatory education. Poor women previously burdened by domestic chores became leaders and rapidly changed their communities. Drought occurred from 2005 to 2008. We assessed intervention effects on household drought resilience with a quasiexperimental format that incorporated survey-based comparisons of treatment groups with ex post controls. Interventions led to major improvements in trends for quality of life, wealth accumulation, hunger reduction, and risk management. Human capacity building can be a driver for change, generating hope and aspirations that set the stage for the use of new information and technology.

Cross-Border Interaction Spurs Innovation and Hope Among Pastoral and Agro-Pastoral Women of Ethiopia and Kenya

On the Ground African pastoralists endure poverty, drought, and hunger. Women are especially marginalized because they are illiterate, unskilled, disempowered, and engaged in daily drudgery. Such women, however, are capable of remarkable, sustained achievements in collective action, livelihood diversification, micro-finance, and community-based wealth generation. Women can be profoundly inspired by successful peers. After careful training and mentoring, inspired women can then start new initiatives. Husbands can be supportive of womens empowerment because household welfare improves. Men sometimes join—and occasionally help lead—collective-action efforts. Womens empowerment should be a major focus in pastoral development projects because of the positive community synergisms women create.

Diversified Investments of Wealthy Ethiopian Pastoralists Include Livestock and Urban Assets That Better Manage Risk

ABSTRACT The Borana pastoral systemhas long been regarded as amodel for sustainable resource use in eastern Africa. Recent growth in human and livestock populations, however, has contributed to amarked decline in rangeland condition, as well as increasing poverty. Another trend is fewer pastoralists controlling more resources. Today, for example, only 10% of households own 60% of all livestock. This wealthyminority has become increasingly important but has received little research attention. We wanted to learn how such elites perceive system change and how they innovate when accumulating or managing their assets. Twelve wealthy men were interviewed. They noted that the pastoral system is in sharp decline,with the most serious livestock-production constraints including chronic shortages of forage and labor. The average value of the physical and financial assets held by these men was estimated as at least USD

Linking Pastoralists and Exporters in a Livestock Marketing Chain: Recent Experiences from Ethiopia

164,000, about 62-times that held by poor households. The average investment portfolio was composed of livestock (two-thirds of total value), while savings accounts in local banks and urban real estate (largely housing) made up the remainder. Livestock in general—and cattle in particular—were the riskiest physical assets given recurrent effects of drought and forage scarcity on animal productivity andmortality. When asked to identify future investment priorities, the men said that investing in urban real estate and their children was now preferred to investing inmore livestock; their tradition of steady livestock reinvestment has thus changed. Recent urban growth in the rangelands has given the wealthy elite new investment options that offset heightened risks of animal losses. Urban investments are important because they could facilitate town development and provide incentives to improve rangemanagement via destocking. Outreach programs focused on the diversification of pastoral assets could includewealthy pastoralists as opinion leaders and accelerate positive change here.