Pastoralist aspirations versus policy in the Horn of Africa

IRIN: Since the Horn of Africa drought of 2011 aid agencies have been working to understand the changes taking place in the drylands, hoping to better anticipate people’s needs. Recent research shows these changes go beyond climate and environment to encompass social and economic factors. The findings have important policy implications.

“The predominant narrative of what these people want to do with their lives is a traditional, pastoral one, where their lives focus on raising animals and continuing in a tradition of pastoral transhumance little changed over centuries,” notes Changes in the arid lands: the expanding rangeland, a joint report by the Red Cross, Oxfam and Save the Children.

External factors, such as drought, have been used to explain pastoralists’ movement from nomadic livestock keeping to living in settlements and peri-urban areas. But this explanation ignores the rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances in these communities, the report says.

“The predominant narrative did not take into consideration vast increases in population (approximately six times greater than 50 years ago), growing materialism and commercialization, and increasing connectedness to the world outside their community… The narrative needed to be updated.”

Researchers asked communities in Shinile and Jijiga in Ethiopia, Togdheer in the self-declared republic of Somaliland, and Turkana, Kenya, what they want for the future. “Across the board, education was listed as the number one method to reach one’s aspirations; either for the interviewees themselves or for their children and grandchildren. Parents - no matter where they live - hope for their children to be educated and to get jobs,” stated the report....

Cattle being watered in Ethiopia's Ghibe Valley, shot by  ILRI/Stevie Mann, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Eroding food security in Somaliland

AllAfrica.com via IRIN: Low agricultural production, caused by poor rainfall last year in Somalia's self-declared republic of Somaliland, has put at least half of its three million people at risk of food insecurity, agricultural officials warn. "We are very worried that the situation could get worse because last year the crop production in the western regions of Somaliland - particularly Awdal, Gabiley and Hargeisa - decreased so much compared to 2008," Abdulkadir Jibril Tukale, director-general of the Ministry of Agriculture, said.

For example, Tukale said, Gabiley was the only region expected to record over 90 percent crop production, "which will provide some stocks for only the Hargeisa region, but Togdher and Awdal regions will depend upon food aid and loans".

Mohamed Muse Awale, chairman of the National Environment Research and Disaster Preparedness Agency (NERAD), noted that in November 2009, government and NGOs estimated that the livelihood crisis caused by rain failure had affected at least 40 percent of the population; that figure, he said, had since risen to 50-60 percent.

District officials in Allaybaday, in the Midwestern Gabiley region, have expressed concern about the livelihood crisis following the recent rain failure in the Deyr and Gu seasons. Hassan Abdi Ali, the mayor, said some 12,000 families in the district had been affected, many of them losing livestock….

A landscape in Somaliland, via Abdullah Geelah, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license