pastoralists

Experts’ ideas about how resource-poor farmers could improve productivity ought to be guided by indigenous knowledge. Low-cost, micro-innovations that make use of local resources have great potential but are often overlooked by mainstream developers of agricultural technology.

By Dr. Florence Wambugu, CEO, Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International (AHBFI)

For Yasser, who lives in Al Fakheet with his mother, Fatmeh, his wife, Hajah, and their 7 children, life has become more difficult as he worries constantly that his family will soon have nowhere to go.

Deep in the Hebron Hills, the village of Al Fakheet is one of eight Palestinian villages where families are facing forced eviction because the government of Israel has declared the area a military zone, referred to as “Fire Zone 918.”

One year since the launch of Oxfam’s appeal for the food crisis in the Horn of Africa, Polycarp Otieno returns to Wajir in northeastern Kenya, to see how Oxfam’s response is helping communities to recover.

Un año después del inicio del llamado a la ayuda de Oxfam para enfrentar la crisis alimentaria en el Cuerno de África, Polycarp Otieno vuelve a Wajir, al noreste de Kenia, para ver cómo la respuesta de Oxfam está ayudando a las comunidades .

It is a year now since the world woke up to what has been called the worst food crisis in the 21st century. The footage of Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya was truly awful, and the conditions people were living in when they arrived at Dollo Ado camp in Ethiopia were quite shocking. The UN categorized parts of Somalia as being in famine – a term used so rarely now that we had started to think it no longer happens.

Ha pasado ya un año desde que el mundo comenzó  a prestar atención a lo que se ha llamado la peor crisis alimentaria del siglo XXI. Las imágenes del campamento de refugiados de Dadaab en Kenia fueron realmente impactantes y las condiciones en que vivían las personas que llegaban al campamento Dollo Ado en Etiopía, atroces. La ONU declaró partes de Somalia en estado de hambruna; un término tan poco utilizado hoy en día, que habíamos empezado a creer que ya estaba erradicada.

On the frontiers of Ethiopia and Somaliland, Oxfam, with funding from ECHO, is helping pastoralists move across borders to cope with future droughts. Caroline Berger reports.

Abdullahi sits chewing qat, a mildly narcotic plant, under the shade of the acacia tree where he was born, and surveys his ancestral lands on the borders of Ethiopia and Somaliland. For centuries, Abdullahi and his grandfathers have followed the pastoralist way of life, moving their herds from one place to another in search of fresh pasture.

Niger is at the center of the current food crisis in West Africa. Oxfam's Caroline Gluck reports from the rural areas around Niamey.

In the first of three blogs, Jane Barrett meets the herders selling their animals to buy grain, and Oxfam’s partners working to support them, during the current West Africa food crisis.