Sustainable Livelihoods - a new approach?
More than four decades of development efforts in emerging countries have largely failed to meet the expectations of governments, donors and intended beneficiaries. Justifiably, all concerned have been disappointed and even frustrated at the lack of progress. However, a concept has been developed that offers a fresh opportunity to get development moving on a sustained and sustainable basis.
Known as the Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches, SLAs build on and extend the best of past practice and emphasise that rather than trying simply to address certain perceived needs, (e.g. household food security or mother and child health) development should focus on people's strengths and the opportunities available to them. In effect, SLAs recognise that life is a multi-tasking process, that every person uses a variety of skills and responds to a range of opportunities. All projects should realize that a farmer does not just have farming in his life, he has children, parents, health and education needs," observes Kevin Gallagher of the Global IPM Facility based at FAO. "Food alone doesn't provide us with a good life."
An Inter-Agency Forum to discuss ways and means of applying SLAs was hosted in Siena, Italy 7-11 March by FAO and DFID with IFAD, WFP, UNDP and CARE also participating. The spur to developing a new approach to development planning and implementation was the International Development Target, agreed by many governments, to halve the number of those living in absolute poverty by 2015. The UK government saw Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches as a means of achieving that aim. "When we looked at the approaches we were taking, we were pretty confident that we were not going to deliver on the International Development Targets", said Sarah Holden, a livestock consultant with DFID. "We needed to radically re-think the way in which we do our business." And Jennie Dey Abbas, Chief of the Rural Participations Service at FAO believes, "We must change the ways in which we approach development."
Some people have mistaken SLAs as a new name for established practice. However SLAs differ in a number of significant aspects in that they:
- Put people at the centre of development rather than the resources that they use.
- Build upon people's strengths rather than their needs.
- Bring all relevant aspects of people's lives and livelihoods into development planning, implementation and evaluation.
- Unify different disciplines and sectors behind a common theme.
- Link government policy levels with community level policies and activities, and identify where interventions may be most appropriate.
- Draw in relevant partners, whether State, civil or private, local or national, regional or international.
UNDP is a major development assistance agency committed to applying the Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches to its future activities and its Chief of Global food Security and Agriculture Programme, Peter Matlon, is convinced of the new concept's worth. "I'm a strong supporter of the SLAs concept," he says, "because it resonates with my experience working with farmers. What I learned was that the important way of making progress was to understand how they perceived their reality, their risks, and constraints. The SL Approach, to me, is the most elegant formulation of that, linking both micro and higher policy levels."
