Why is Investment on Natural Resource Management in East African drylands important?

1. NRM Innovations for Risk Management and Agricultural
Transformation in Semiarid East African Highlands
Tilahun Amede and Team

2. 2
Resilient Socio‐ecological systems
 Managing extreme events; drought and flood
 Ensure sustainable flow of ecosystem services
 Sustain employment and income generation opportunities that
support local livelihoods and the national economy;
 To conserve biodiversity and protect the environment
Why Investment on NRM
in East African drylands?
 To increase and sustain productivity in a given production system;
 Support crop, livestock, water, energy, construction, manufacturing,
mining and other sectors

3. I: Community‐based watershed management (e.g. Ethiopia)

4. ICRISAT and Wollo University

5. 5
Market Incentives: Rainwater harvesting in AZGO watershed
(95 water harvesting ponds in a small watershed);
(Average income 5500 USD per HH)

6. “No pond, no wife”
• Targeted water harvesting
and willing farmers
• Move from household to
community‐level large scale
ponds‐
• Linking water harvesting with
market oriented high value
commodities‐ dairy, fattening
• Improved access to market
Infrastructure
• Affordable water lifting
facilities, with maintenance
support – youth group
• Building local capacity in
value addition, pest
management and agronomy

7. Impact on Food Security
• In the intervention kebeles, at least 34% of the households faced food
shortage during the year. However, it is 79% for control kebele:
• In addition to incidence, the depth and duration of food insecurity is very high
in the control kebeles:
34%
66%
79%
21%
Intervention Group Control Group
Yes No
Have you faced food shortage during the past 12 months?

8. Impact on Crop Yield..
• Crop yield in the intervention areas has been improving
• Particularly, yield improvement from lands with conservation structures was
significant.

9. 2. Resilience building and climate risk management
(e.g Using water spreading weirs as an entrypoint) (GIZ‐ICRISAT)
Source: GIZ/ ICRISAT

10. Monitoring soil water regimes
Fitting varieties,
Change crop types,
Adjusting management

11. Potential Target Location for flood-based farming in Belg and
Meher seasons : 2015 - 2018
Flood frequency
% flooded area
Feb‐15 Mar‐15 Apr‐15 May‐15 Jun‐15 Jul‐15 Aug‐15 Sep‐15
1 year 6.1 6.1 7.1 5.8 6.2 6.7 7.6 11.0
2 years 3.7 3.6 4.3 3.5 2.5 3.9 4.9 4.8
3 years 2.5 2.6 3.2 2.2 2.3 2.9 4.9 2.6
4 years 1.1 1.6 2.1 1.1 1.8 1.8 7.0 1.3

12. Community
Contributing
labour, growing
crops, in
onfarm research,
collective action
Wollo University,
Kebele. Support local
action, community
facilitation; designing
bylaws
ICRISAT
Agricultural intensification,
creating local partnership,
introducing best practices;
creating local capacity and
leading the science
BOA
Learning / demonstration
Investment for Scaling
Large scale mobilization
creating partnership
ICRISAT-WU-BOA partnership

13. Participatory planning and implementation
• Community consultations and prioritization of
landscape issues; Baseline +
• BOA encouraged farmers to organize groups;
experimenting on technologies and practices; Site-
specific
• Researchers continuously consulted and introduced
new interventions, helping farmers to tryout and
innovate;
• Establishing strong links between communities and
the local administration, BOA; Cross-LS interaction
• Generating evidence and sharing it widely through
field visits, farmer conference; Knowledge-sharing
forums

14.  Strong partnership created with Wollo Universities Sirinka
RC, Local government
 Common understanding on the scale of the challenge and
trust (respect our agreements; If I invest, will I benefit?)
 Building trust overtime through:
a) clear understanding of roles and responsibilities
(informal norms or policies)
b) Started with few actors, grown over time
c) Sharing of recognition but also cost
 Influential clan leaders taking the lead in mobilization
 Local government introduce managed Sanctions
(appropriate to the offense)
 Free riders were regulated through local byelaws
 BOA taking most of the credit in political forums; including
reward
Creating Strong Local level Collective Action

15. Institutional impact
• Became a learning site for the
district and the zone
• In early 2016, government and
community leaders from 23 districts
met at the site for planning WSM
interventions
• Regional campaign for soil and
water conservation was declared by
the zonal administrator
• Excellencies..

16. http://www.icrisat.org/