Livelihoods

In this report, Oxfam America shares project updates and key accomplishments of the July – September 2011 quarter, and provides detailed information on the enrollment results of the third annual offering of weather insurance in Ethiopia.

Publication Summary: For the 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, vulnerability to weather-related shocks is a constant threat to security and well-being. As climate change drives an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural hazards, the challenges faced by food-insecure communities struggling to improve their lives and livelihoods will also increase. The question of how to build rural resilience against weather-related risk is critical for addressing global poverty.

In response to this challenge, in 2007, Oxfam America, together with local and international partners,1 launched a pilot program called HARITA, or Horn of Africa Risk Transfer for Adaptation, to work with farmers on building their resilience to climate change. Today, the program has grown to become Oxfam’s Rural Resilience Initiative, or R4 (http://www.oxfamamerica.org/issues/insurance/). Initiated as a result of the partnership with the United Nations World Food Programme announced at the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference, R4 builds upon the highly successful growth of the multiyear HARITA pilot in Ethiopia.

HARITA, in its three years of delivery in Ethiopia’s northernmost state of Tigray, has shown promising results for replication. More than 1,300 households participated in HARITA in 2010, up from 200 in its first year. In the 2011 agricultural season, HARITA expanded its outreach by 10 times with more than 13,000 farmers in 43 villages signing up for insurance.

This presentation by Dan Gudahl (Winrock International), was part of the Ag Sector Council Meeting, "Making Transformational, Scalable, and Sustainable Changes in Rural Bangladesh." The seminar was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. on November 30, 2011.

Different Uses, Different Scales. Africa contains countless basins which together supply water for the domestic, livelihood, and irrigation needs of the continent’s inhabitants. The water resources of these basins are further used to generate much of the continent’s electricity, satisfy environmental water needs, and provide ecosystem services. Issues related to balancing these diverse water uses are a function of scale. On a large scale, balancing multiple water uses often involves enabling agricultural production in different parts of a basin and striking a balance among agriculture, hydropower, and environmental water uses. At a more local level, use of water may need to be balanced between agriculture and domestic water use.

Balancing Multiple Uses and Climate Change. Balancing multiple uses in the face of climate change will require using stakeholder processes to arrive at strategies that cope with variability in water availability. These processes would benefit from clear and accessible information on tradeoffs associated with different allocations of water to different uses. Further, risks and opportunities associated with predicted changes in rainfall amounts and distributions should be evaluated.

This factsheet was developed as part of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Climate-Smart Agriculture Workshop. The workshop focused on approaches for effective program design of climate-smart agriculture in support of both country and regional CAADP investment plans. Climate-smart agriculture incorporates practices that increase productivity, efficiency, resilience, adaptive capacity, and mitigation potential of production systems.

A number of factors threaten agricultural productivity for African farmers. Many of Africa’s soils are highly weathered and low in nutrients and soil carbon. As a result, they have limited capacity to retain the nutrients and soil moisture necessary for high yields. Climate variability and change pose additional challenges for producers. Some farmers are experiencing more frequent and intense storms that cause erosion, rainwater run-off, and crop damage, while others experience more frequent droughts. At the same time rainfall patterns are becoming more variable with delayed onset and length of the rainy season, and in some cases, drought. These unpredictable patterns make it difficult for farmers to plan and manage their crops. Fortunately, there are a range of management practices and technologies that can be applied on-farm to increase agricultural resilience to climate stress.

This factsheet was developed as part of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Climate-Smart Agriculture Workshop. The workshop focused on approaches for effective program design of climate-smart agriculture in support of both country and regional CAADP investment plans. Climate-smart agriculture incorporates practices that increase productivity, efficiency, resilience, adaptive capacity, and mitigation potential of production systems.

Pastoralism is considered the most economically, culturally, and socially appropriate strategy for maintaining the well-being of communities in dryland landscapes, because it can simultaneously provide secure livelihoods, conserve ecosystem services, promote wildlife conservation and honor cultural values and traditions. At the same time, future agronomic potential and economic viability of these systems will be directly dependent on the sustainable management of the natural resource base that is their foundation. To cope with fluctuating forage and water availability resulting from climatic variability, pastoralists and agro-pastoralists have developed a variety of survival strategies largely based on indigenous social safety nets.

This factsheet was developed as part of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Climate-Smart Agriculture Workshop. The workshop focused on approaches for effective program design of climate-smart agriculture in support of both country and regional CAADP investment plans. Climate-smart agriculture incorporates practices that increase productivity, efficiency, resilience, adaptive capacity, and mitigation potential of production systems.