Karin Astrid Siegmann from SDPI in her presentation ‘ Vulnerability and resilience in rural North-West Pakistan' (co-authored by Bernd Siegmann, University of Zurich) argued that the recent earthquake in NWFP brought to the fore the poor as the most vulnerable group, pointing to the necessity of organizing people around their interests, instead of imposing a top-down policy on them. Tackling gender inequalities might decrease poverty, as the gender differences in accessing livelihood assets was one reason for women's greater vulnerability. The factors of vulnerability identified by were poverty, diversification of livelihoods, and the collapse of infrastructure. Health-related problems were the most common crises in the three studied villages. Siegmann discovered that improved access to assets did not systematically reduce vulnerability for the villages. To be involved in social networks appears to be a coping strategy in case of crises.
Muhammad Bashir and Irfanullah of the Agricultural University Peshawar in their presentation Livelihoods Risks in Pakistan argued that Pakistan is confronting several livelihood threats, like natural disasters, decreasing water resources, depleting soil fertility, shrinking farm size challenges of WTO as well as gender imbalances. These issues need serious attention, as despite satisfactory growth of the Pakistani economy, one-third of its population is still poor. Water resources and soil fertility are depleting, they added, with farm sizes shrinking and 100,000 small farmers leaving the agricultural sector annualy.
Atif Nasim from SDPI presented Stefan Schütte's and Aftab Opel's co-authored paper Urban Households in Afghanistan: How Poor Households Cope with Risk and Insecurity. The two are working with the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) in Kabul. Their findings were that regularity of employment and the ability to maintain savings is crucial to enhance and diversify asset bases. Access to unconditional credit enhances asset bases, which is connected to the existence of social networks. They found that where women work, access to credit appears to be higher. They highlighted the fact that livelihood strategies are a combination of labor market, savings, borrowings, investments, productive and reproductive activities, income, labor and asset pooling, adjustment of household size and composition and social networking. Livelihood strategies include coping, mitigating, and enhancing strategies.
Mahmud Cheema from IUCN chaired the session. Dr. Sajjad Akhtar, from the Center for Research in Poverty Reduction & Income Distribution (CRPRID) was the discussant for the session. He suggested applying appropriate analytical tools to dig deeper into the issue of livelihood threats in Pakistan and to analyze the linkages amongst the various threats to livelihoods. In the discussion session the participants pointed out that there were certain factors were missing from the list of crises such as natural calamities, terrorist activities in NWFP and the mafia networks.
Reported by Tahira Sadaf
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