UNRAVEL Understanding vulnerable and resilient livelihoods Gina Ziervogel

1
UNRAVEL Understanding vulnerable and resilient
livelihoods Gina Ziervogel
2
Multiple stressors and their impact on rural
livelihoods

• Households at risk to multiple threats
• Climate variability
• Health
• Market fluctuations
• Food insecurity
• Cumulative effect of shocks and stresses through
  time
• Response to shocks and stresses
• Focus on HIV/AIDS by assessing households with
  chronically ill
• Impact on food security

3

• Understand existing household response to stress
• Nature of response
• through time, different members,
  external/internal
• Adaptive/maladaptive strategies
• At household level
• At community level
• Further support/intervention

4
Case study evidence

• Vhembe District, Limpopo, northern South Africa
• Northern south Africa
• Former homeland area
• Good commercial crops but little support for
  marginal groups particularly with regards to food
  security
• Chikwawa District, southern Malawi
• Southern region
• Poor district
• Relatively high level of external support, with a
  number of food security-related projects
• Diocese of Monze, southern Zambia
• Southern region
• Livestock, crop mix

5
Objectives

• Identify and document the everyday threats as
  well as other sudden onset and creeping threats
  faced
• Full agricultural cycle (12 months)
• 3 comparative settings
• Identify and document the livelihood responses of
  individuals and households to such risks and the
  consequences of this action
• Identify those livelihood strategies associated
  with greater household resilience to AIDS
  impacts, and those which increase vulnerability
  to AIDS losses.

6
Objectives.. cont

• Identify community and institutional mechanisms
  that either undermine or augment at-risk
  livelihood assets, capabilities and activities
• Feed-back the knowledge generated by the research
  to better sensitise ongoing home-based care and
  food security or other livelihood enhancement
  programmes in the participating communities
• Support the dissemination of knowledge gained
  from the research into policy and practice
  through
• Partner networks
• Country and regional networks
• Incorporate into academic programmes on disaster
  risk reduction and HIV/AIDS

7
Methodology

• Pilot methodology
• One village in each country
• Baseline study
• On-going monitoring
• every 2 months x 5
• Final baseline comparison
• 20 households
• 10 with members who are chronically ill or have
  recently died from a chronic illness
• 10 that appear not to be directly impacted by
  HIV/AIDS in the sense that there are no
  chronically sick members and no-one has recently
  died

8
Community participation

• Identification of households
• Village structures civil society groups and
  traditional authorities
• Home-based care groups
• Agricultural extension officers
• On-going monitoring
• Researcher
• Village-based support PLWA (SA), Extension, HBC
  (Malawi)
• Initial suspicion from community members
• Truthful answers as trust increases through
  on-going interaction

9
Challenges with local partnerships

• South Africa University of Venda
• Ethical clearance
• Support from all levels community, NGOs
• (little interaction with international partners)
• Malawi Cadecom MHEN
• Research experience lacking (data collection,
  analysis)
• Project management
• Zambia
• First researcher died from chronic illness
• No interaction between research and advocacy
  partners
• Academic analysis experience lacking

10
Preliminary findings

• SA
• Role of grants. Eg. Disability grant has helped
  sick people recover and maintain or adapt their
  livelihoods
• Stress of burial society
• Less agriculture than 5 years ago food not
  locally produced
• Malawi
• Cultural and traditional practices
• Not acknowledging sick members cultural
  practices that increase infection
• Survival strategies threaten hh sustainability
  migrant labour
• Volunteering for HBC can make households more
  vulnerable
• Zambia
• Reliance of petty commerce compared to piecework
  in other 2 sites

11
Conclusion

• Findings intend to
• Illustrate the ability of community and district
  institutions to support responses
• Identify where and what type of intervention
  might help
• This project has helped me to look at a
  household as an entity. This is important to
  address first before scaling up to a national
  initiative. This bottom-up approach is very
  important and UNRAVEL provides a focus for that.
• Local participation helps to
• capture sensitive and important results in the
  slow-onset/food insecurity/ HIV/AIDS context
• Support local partnerships
• Build capacity