Prospects for Livestock-Based Livelihoods in Africa’s Drylands examines the challenges and opportunities facing the livestock sector and the people who depend on livestock in the dryland regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Dryland regions in Sub-Saharan Africa are home to one-half of the region’s population and three-quarters of its poor. Poor both in natural resources and in assets and income, the inhabitants of drylands are highly vulnerable to droughts and other shocks. Despite a long history of interventions by governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations, there have been no sustained large-scale successes toward improving the resilience of drylands dwellers.
More than 200 million people living in dryland regions of Sub-Saharan Africa make their living from agriculture. Most are exposed to weather shocks, especially drought, that can decimate their incomes, destroy their assets, and plunge them into a poverty trap from which it is difficult to emerge. Their lack of resilience in the face of these shocks can be attributed in large part to the poor performance of agriculture on which their livelihood depends. Opportunities exist to improve the fortunes of farming households in the drylands.
Meeting Name: Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA)
Meeting symbol/code: CGRFA-16/17/15
Session: Sess.16
Meeting Name: Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA)
Meeting symbol/code: CGRFA-16/17/15
Session: Sess.16
Meeting Name: FAO Regional Conference for Africa (ARC)
Meeting symbol/code: ARC/16/INF/16
Session: Sess. 29
This brief describes the broad array of impacts arising from a cash transfer programme that was piloted in the Tigray region of Ethiopia from 2011 to 2014. About 80 percent of Tigray’s population of 4.3 million live in rural areas and depend on rain-fed subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods. Farm families in Tigray tend to have small land holdings and limited productive inputs such as labour, oxen, seeds and fertilizers. Severe drought has repeatedly struck the northern Tigray region and has had a major effect on agricultural productivity.
This publication was commissioned under the auspices of the project “FAO technical support to the COMESA-EAC-SADC program on climate change adaptation and mitigation in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSRO/RAF/307/COM)”.
Meeting Name: Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Intergovernmental Technical Working Group on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
Meeting symbol/code: CGRFA/WG-PGR-8/16/Inf.9
Session: Sess. 8
Through our robust search engine, you can search for any item of the over 64,800 highly curated resources in the Land Library.
If you would like to find an overview of what is possible, feel free to peruse the Search Guide.
