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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the report relating to the facts finding mission conducted by HAKIARDHI and LHRC as an intervention in response to an outcry from the villagers at Namwawala village in Kilombero district, Morogoro region, owing to the alleged plan of the government to take possession of the village land for investment purposes.

This report on harnessing pastoralists’ indigenous knowledge of rangeland management in three countries in East and the Horn of Africa is presented in two parts. The first part presents a review of the literature.