Integrating poverty alleviation in vulnerable areas into national development strategies

Context

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

Implementation

Examples of the most vulnerable social groups in Kenya are: households without livestock, tenant farmers paid in kind, households with houses needing repair, women heads of household, households that could not offer food to visitors, farmers without seeds, households with no other source of income except their produce and families with children under five. Two types of strategies are vital: (1) the improvement of production and nutrition, often with direct food assistance; and (2) the setting up of community shops offering food credit, and other credit systems to enable purchase of tools.

Claim

Long-term development work should take into account permanent short-term welfare needs.

Food security implies an improvement of the socio-economic environment that can only be brought about by public intervention. Even in situations of serious crisis for a state, its public policies are still a framework of reference that cannot be ignored. Ignoring the link between public policy and the macro-economic level is a sure way of acting for the short term only.

Governments at the appropriate level, with the support of the relevant international and regional organizations, should establish and maintain mechanisms to ensure the integration of strategies for poverty alleviation among the inhabitants of lands prone to desertification into sectoral and national development plans and programmes.