Supporting pastoral mobility in East & West Africa

Livestock mobility is crucial for ensuring high livestock productivity, market access and building prosperous and peaceful societies in the drylands. CELEP member IIED (International Institute for Environment and Development) and its partners documented several successful initiatives to facilitate livestock mobility and experimented with scenario planning to help empower pastoralists and allow them to influence decisions on policy or resource allocation.

In several countries in East and West Africa, initiatives to facilitate livestock mobility and remove the obstacles that constrain otherwise flexible pastoral systems have seen some success. IIED and its partners documented these efforts in country studies that focus on the factors that affect livestock mobility and explore what governments, development workers and researchers have done to promote it.

You can find all the reviews and publications here, including the book “Modern and mobile: the future of livestock production in Africa’s drylands (2009, 88pp), which brings together the words of pastoralists and experts from across the drylands of East and West Africa. Using scientific research data and information from the case studies, it challenges persistent misconceptions that pastoralism is outmoded and uneconomic. Explaining the reasons behind mobility, the book shows that mobile livestock obtain better nutrition, produce more meat and milk, are healthier and deliver more calves than do animals kept in sedentary production systems. The book reveals the real value of the national and international trade in livestock and the crucial need for mobility during Africa’s frequent and naturally occurring droughts.

Posted on 12 January 2019 in Pastoralism, Mobility & Land Tenure, Pastoralist Livelihoods & Nutrition, Value of Pastoralism