The rationale supporting the design of this programme was to increase household and community resilience by producing surpluses through better husbandry and diversification and developing collective storage mechanisms in the context of better post-harvest management. By leveraging the integrated experience of Livelihoods with Governance and Human Rights (GHR) programming, allowed for the incorporation of activities to stimulate conflict transformation and strengthen accountability in the use of devolved public funds in order to achieve greater impact in livelihoods and resilience. Resilience will be built by addressing conflict, which is restricting access to productive land and natural resources, and developing the ability of communities to engage critically in decisions over the allocation of public funds with the help of social auditing skills.
Strategy of Change :The programme was designed to optimise the existing capacity in community mobilization models. Such approaches apply a diffusion of innovation (Rogers, 1962) model in that ‘early adopters’ and individuals with peer influence are the first to be targeted to take up modified behaviours and others are encouraged to follow once personal risks have been better evaluated and additional rewards demonstrated (eg. successful introduction of the Toggenberg breed of goats which provide higher milk yields).
Outputs associated with community capacity in DRR, conflict transformation and auditing public funds, in which trained community leaders and representatives model new roles within a social context build more on social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1963) with its emphasis on role modeling, building self-efficacy and integrating personal, social and environmental factors. Our work on conflict is based on a conflict transformation approach, which recognizes that conflict may be embedded in a pattern of conflictual relationships that extend beyond the actual site of conflict (Lederach, 1995).
Realising Change: Drawing on past experience, including the 2011 drought, the ARP integrates humanitarian, resilience and longer-term development elements based on a model of action in which access to improved and diversified agricultural (livestock and crop) inputs at household level (by early adopter families/peer influencers) will create more resilient (moving from coping with hunger-gaps to seasonal food supply) food security (production capacity linked to agricultural value chain improvements) for these families that in turn will support the adoption by more households of improved, more sustainable livestock and farming practices within communities.
And from this basis (attitude) communities can come together, around the agricultural food value chain (capacity) to work at an aggregate-level (cross community) on food resilience, such as improved animal husbandry (productivity, disease resilience) creating animal products (milk, meat, animal hide, etc.) that can either complement dietary needs (food security) or be sold (income generation); and extensive farming (scale) based on the success of intensive (sustenance) farming techniques, creating food surpluses that can be stored, preserved (food security and diet) or sold (income generation) creating the foundation for more cooperative approaches to strengthening the strategic points (adding value) in the agricultural value chain (such as post-harvest management, value-chain improvements and commercialisation).
