Drawing on insights from multiple studies, this policy brief addresses the importance of gender considerations for small-scale livestock farming communities relative to food security in the South African context. The brief examines some key elements of gender issues in relation to small-scale livestock farming, asks how some of these elements align with current policies and practices, and suggests a number of focused policy recommendations. Two thirds of the world’s 600 million poor livestock keepers are rural women.

The demand to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger has been the centrepiece of the Millennium Development Goals; the first MDG stands for the inextricable link between poverty and people’s ability to access safe, nutritious and sufficient food. How will the objective of achieving global food and nutrition security be embedded in the SDGs? Will the SDGs be a further step towards this target?

With reference to the “One World – No Hunger” Initiative, Stefan Schmitz shows how food policies can support the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals and highlights the interdependencies between the individual goals and targets.

Le projet de barrage de Fomi se situe sur le Niandan, affluent du Niger en Haute-Guinée, non loin de Kankan. Le projet Fomi est intégré au Plan d’action de développement durable (PADD) de l’Autorité du Bassin du Niger (ABN) depuis 2007. Une étude d’impact environnemental et social, composée d’un plan de gestion environnementale et sociale, d’un plan de réinstallation involontaire et d’un plan de développement local, a été finalisée en 2010.

The Fomi dam project is located on the Niandan tributary of the Niger in Guinea, 30 km upstream of the Niandan-Niger confluence, near Kankan (region of Upper Guinea). In development since 1988 with an update of the feasibility study in 1999, the Fomi project is integrated in the Sustainable Development Action Plan (SDAP) of the Niger Basin Authority (NBA) since 2007. An Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, consisting of an Environmental and Social Management Plan, Involuntary Resettlement Plan and a Local Development Plan, was completed in 2010.

Sustainable agricultural approaches such as agroecology can help producers increase productivity while protecting the environment and strengthening resilience to climate change. Nonetheless, policymakers rarely support them on a large scale and take-up remains low. This report analyses the factors determining the adoption of sustainable practices in Mozambique, exploring whether a common understanding of ‘sustainable agriculture’ exists, how this is reflected in policy and practice, and what drives farmers (not) to adopt them.

About two-thirds of the developing world’s 3 billion rural people live in about 475 million small farm households, working on land plots smaller than 2 hectares. 1 Many are poor and food insecure and have limited access to markets and services. Their choices are constrained, but they farm their land and produce food for a substantial proportion of the world’s population. Besides farming they have multiple economic activities, often in the informal economy, to contribute towards their small incomes.

The Karamoja region in Northeastern Uganda, covering an area of 27,200 square kilometers, is inhabited by around 1.2 million people who live in seven districts; Moroto, Nakapiripirit, Napak, Amudat, Abim, Kotido and Kaabong. Its residents are mainly Ngakarimojong speaking peoples, but the area is also home to the Ethur, Labwor, Pokot, and indigenous minorities such as the Tepes and the Ik.

ACES is a three-year (2014 -2017) research project that is being implemented in Mozambique with the main purpose being to contribute to poverty alleviation in Mozambique by co-producing new knowledge of the dynamic links between land use change, Ecosystem Services (ES) and the wellbeing of the rural poor and thereby meet the demand from policy makers and practitioners for ways to better manage Mozambique’s woodlands (Dewees et al. 2008; Wiggins et al. 2012).

As organizations working on food security, natural resources management and poverty eradication, we strongly encourage governments to keep the profile of land and natural resources high in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda document to be endorsed in September 2015. Secure and equitable land rights are an essential element of an Agenda that has the ambition to be people-centred and planet-sensitive.

This book is a challenge to those who see the drylands as naturally vulnerable to food insecurity and poverty. 

It argues that improving agricultural productivity in dryland environments is possible by working with climatic uncertainty rather than seeking to control it – a view that runs contrary to decade of development practice in arid and semi-arid lands.

Across China, Kenya and India – and most other dryland countries – family farmers and herders relate to the inherent variability of the drylands as a resource to be valued, rather than a problem to be avoided. 

Over the last decade, the Government of Rwanda (GoR) has introduced several land reforms through formulation and enactment of enabling legal framework, establishment of land administration institutions and implementation of national land tenure regularization. Further, the Land Act of 2013 stipulated that all landholders must formally register their land. To support registration compliance, the GoR decentralized the Land Administration System (LAS) to all District Land Bureaus (DLBs).