PN37 (Increasing Water-Use Efficiency for Food Production through Better Livestock Management -

The Nile River Basin) set out to improve food security, reduce poverty and enhance agroecosystem

health by managing livestock for more effective overall use of water. PN37 responded to water

challenges posed by the CPWF, to the Nile Basin Initiative’s goal of better sharing benefits of water

use, and to global need for the livestock sector to use agricultural water more efficiently and

A flock monitoring study on 60 households as undertaken from October 2008 to September 2009 to measure productive and reproductive performances; determine socioeconomic benefits and husbandry practices; and identify production barriers and suggest intervention options in Alaba Special Woreda. The Woreda was stratified on the basis of sheep and goat densities and the respective sites and households were selected using multistage (purposive and random) sampling techniques. Mean land holding per household was 1.5 ha.

During the past 70 years, concerted efforts by the national veterinary services of affected countries from Senegal to China and Russia to South Africa—aided by international organizations—have brought the once-dreaded rinderpest virus to the point of extinction. In the near future, we can expect to see a global declaration of freedom from rinderpest, the first time this has been achieved for a livestock disease. The devastation wrought by rinderpest stimulated the founding of veterinary schools in many countries, and provided the basis for the development of the veterinary profession.

The traditional lifestyle of nomadic pastoralists is vanishing rapidly, because of human population growth which often leads to land scarcity or political pressure on pastoralists to settle. The sedentarisation of the Bahima pastoralists in Western Uganda started in the 1940s and is still going on. In this study former nomadic cattle keepers, who have settled with their families, were interviewed in order to document the decision to settle and the subsequent changes in the lifestyle of these people. All interviewees expressed their satisfaction with their sedentary life.

The drylands of Africa, exclusive of hyper-arid zones, occupy about 43 per cent of the continent, and are home to a rapidly growing population that currently stands at about 325 million people. Dry zones, inclusive of hyper-arid lands, cover over 70 per cent of the continent’s terrestrial surface. Outside of the cities many dryland inhabitants are either pastoralists, sedentary or nomadic, or agro-pastoralists, combining livestock-rearing and crop production where conditions allow.

CPWF Mekong Project 5 is divided into two components, the first relating to coordination, and the second to the development, management and maintenance of multiple stakeholder platforms.

Coordination

The Basin Leader leads this project team, which is responsible for coherence of the overall BDC research program through ensuring BDC research remains problem-, opportunity- and impact-focused.

Multiple stakeholder platforms

The purpose of this report is first to provide evidence of the role of livestock in rural livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Further, the report aims to identify opportunities for investments that build on that evidence and hold promise for improving and sustaining the livelihoods of smallholder livestock producers and their rural communities in developing countries. This analysis is presented in order to support the decision making of those public and private development investors, and policy makers, for whom improved rural livelihoods is a key objective.

Land use changes in East Africa have transformed land cover to farmlands, grazing lands, human settlements and urban centers at the expense of natural vegetation. These changes are associated with deforestation, biodiversity loss and land degradation. A synthesis of results of long term research by an interdisciplinary team reveals the linkages between land use change, biodiversity loss and land degradation. The results indicate that as native vegetation is lost, indigenous plant and animal biodiversity and plant cover are lost.

The study discusses land-degradation in pastoral communities and depicts land-use system and associated human and livestock population pressure as the major determinant of vegetation cover, surface run-off, soil erosion, and species richness. The study recommends use of enclosures to reverse range degradation, and diversification of pastoral economies to reduce poverty and relieve pressure on land as the primary source of livelihood in the semi-arid rangelands of Kenya

A myriad of agricultural and livestock production systems co-exist in the developing countries. Agricultural research for development should therefore aim at delivering strategies that are well targeted to the heterogeneous landscapes and diverse biophysical and socioeconomic contexts the agricultural production system is operating in. To that end, in the recent past several approaches to spatially delineate landscapes with broadly similar production strategies, constraints and investment opportunities, have been applied. The mapped Seré and