Background
For many poor people in Southern Africa, a situation of chronic livelihoods insecurity has been unfolding. Many households run a continual risk of being unable to meet their livelihood needs. NGOs across the region have been exploring ways they can ensure poor people achieve better livelihood security. It's been recognised that to develop better operational responses, there is a need to learn from grassroots practitioners on how they are responding to livelihood insecurity within their programmes and projects and look at how this can be strengthened by knowledge and information from research and policy level. This work has meant taking account of what has been called the Triple Threat - the combined web of factors that reduce people's livelihood security:
(1) Food Insecurity (Environmental), (2) Governance and (3) HIV and AIDS
To better understand how programmers were recognising and responding to this complex situation, Concern- Worldwide (CWW), Oxfam-International (OI) and the Southern African Regional Poverty Network (SARPN) commissioned a study. Scott Drimie visited practitioners in Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia to better understand how they saw livelihood insecurity on the ground, and how they were responding. The exercise was highly flexible, allowing practitioners an opportunity to identify how their own activities help respond to long-term livelihood insecurity. The study results provided a synthesis of programme responses to livelihood insecurity, with a particular focus on food insecurity and tried to tease out the differences experienced by men or women. The results point to the importance of livelihood diversification and innovative strategies, support that underpins self-reliance not perpetuating dependency, access to information, building on community coping mechanisms, close link between livelihood insecurity and politics. It also emphasises the challenges of non-state actors in working on governance or rights issues and livelihood security. The report was then fed back to all participants and presented at regional level meetings in Ireland, UK and South Africa as well as shared on the SARPN website.
This workshop has been organised as a follow up to the study, to provide participants a platform to discuss their experiences on how civil society organisations can better support poor people. People from CWW, OI and partner organisations in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique along with RENEWAL and FANRPAN at a regional level were invited to spend two days collectively analysing how we as development practitioners can improve our work to ensure poor people are better able to achieve livelihood security, taking better account of the Triple Threat factors. The emphasis was on learning from each other's experiences. It was agreed at the beginning of the two days that we would aim towards one simple expectation:
This workshop report is a synthesis of the work undertaken over the two days. Rather than providing a verbatim account of the proceedings, it highlights the key sharing and learning under three main headings. The content under each heading was pulled together through brainstorming, group discussions, and plenary, mapping and other participatory techniques. As such, the contents of this report are the responsibility of all people present at the workshop.
What is the Triple Threat?
In 1992, Southern Africa suffered severe drought leading to a huge humanitarian response. By 2001 a less severe drought was experienced in an era of far greater political security (and therefore greater opportunity for the poor), but the impact on the lives of poor people was greater and deeper. Something had happened in the previous 10 years such that people were more vulnerable to livelihood insecurity. By 2003, the UN led efforts to identify what had changed and coined the concept of the Triple Threat. Whilst the concept and what it meant is still contentious, broadly speaking, as a workshop group, we agreed it meant increased livelihood insecurity as a result of three inter-related factors:
Food Insecurity (Environment)
- Vulnerability to drought or flood (uncertain rainfall patterns)
- Soil degradation (in agricultural production areas)
- Environmental degradation (negative impact of farming systems)
- Population pressure on fragile ecosystems (debatable)
- Dependence on mono-cropping (staples)
- Poorly implemented land reform, or policies that favour large scale agriculture or cash crops
Governance
- Policy environment such as tariffs and taxes on agriculture
- Limited options for employment diversification
- Lack of accountability or proper allocation and use of state resources
- Leadership; vision that does not focus on poor people
- Poor functioning of institutions at all level of society
- The relationship between those who govern and the governed
- Participation and the voice of citizens, including lack of civil rights and education
HIV and AIDS
- AIDS disproportionately affects the most productive portion of the population
- Lack of impact of prevention strategies, learning from failures and inadequate use of knowledge on prevention
- Difficulty in providing relevant treatment particularly to rural communities
- Enter twined with poverty and social or cultural norms: masculinity
- Stigma - enables the disease to hide
- Gender inequality
- Lack of knowledge - leading to confusion on the ground
- Long term nature of the pandemic - inter-generational impacts
- HIV as a business where donors apply ideological rather than evidence based solutions on government leading to conditionalities not meeting the reality
What are we as practitioners doing to respond to increasing livelihood insecurity?
As practitioners, we recognised the changing causes of livelihood insecurity, and had made programmatic adjustments accordingly, in particular there was a significant increase in HIV programme activities, mainstreaming of HIV into livelihood programmes, and advocacy on key issues with government or national level actors. Nutrition gardens, income generation, specific support to HIV+ support groups, influencing government policies on issues such as tariffs were common activities across the region. Participants also reflected on the how success looks like in practise and highlighted a couple of aspects such as working with governments in some cases meant that influencing space was bought through 'hardware' and therefore opening space for 'software' issues such as rights. Another example is community gardens, which are not just about food security, but giving people political capital in systems that are dominated by patronage.
