An Agricultural Economist who currently works in Livestock Marketing Systems and Livelihood-based Emergency interventions in Africa, Yacob has worked extensively throughout the Horn and in Southern Africa countries. He has written a number of papers on veterinary drug privatization, livelihood-based emergency interventions and livestock marketing systems and contributed to recent assessment reports on the crisis in Darfur and Ethiopia for USAID. In the last few years he has been actively engaged in assessing and analyzing the pastoral livelihood system, designing and testing pilot programs in the areas of alternative livelihoods, livelihood-based emergency interventions, privatization and livestock and livestock products marketing. His “Lessons Learnt” documents have led to wide-scale adaptations of the pilot projects by other agencies and have contributed to policy changes particularly in Kenya and Ethiopia. Aklilu consults for NGOs, Governments and donors on a range of pastoral issues that include assessments, analysis or program design in the Horn. Prior to joining Tufts, he worked with UNICEF, the UN, FINNIDA and NGOs in Mozambique, Zambia and Iraq.
E-mail: yacob.aklilu@tufts.edu
Reports
This report explores what has happened to the livestock trade in the greater Darfur region during nine years of conflict, since 2003. Livestock is one of Darfur’s main economic assets and makes a major contribution to Sudan’s national livestock and … Read More
The USAID funded PSNP Plus project ‘Linking Poor Rural Households to Microfinance and Markets in Ethiopia’ ended in December 2011. The PSNP Plus was designed as a three-year project in support of the Government of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), which provides food and or cash to chronically food insecure households in exchange for labor on rural infrastructure projects, or direct transfers to households unable to participate in physical labor activities. The overall goal of the PSNP Plus was to build household resilience and household assets through market linkages and access to microfinance this goal being directly linked to the objective of facilitating the graduation of households from the PSNP and out of chronic food insecurity.
Between 2008 and 2011, over two thousand households were provided with informal loans for livestock value addition in an effort to graduate them from the Productive Safety Net Programme in Raya Azebo woreda, Ethiopia.
Although pastoralists in Ethiopia are often characterized as unresponsive to market opportunities, the bulk of Ethiopia’s growing formal and informal livestock and meat exports are supplied from pastoralist areas of the country.
This was a follow on study to earlier regional analysis for the IGAD-FAO Livestock Policy Initiative that examined the benefits of livestock exports by pastoralist wealth group.
The last few years have witnessed a renewed interest in the export of live animals and meat from Kenya and Ethiopia. In both cases, the private sector has taken the lead in initiating or advocating for the revival of the export business, prompting the respective governments to pay attention to the potentials of livestock trade.
Support to the export of pastoralist livestock from the Horn of Africa is often viewed by aid organizations as a key poverty reduction strategy. Drawing on existing literature and field research in Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, this report examines if and how different wealth groups benefit from the export trade. It looks in detail at the household-level economic strategies of different pastoralist wealth groups and their marketing behaviors, and concludes that in terms of poverty reduction, poorer herders benefit least from livestock exports.
It does not need research to demonstrate that the conflict in Darfur has destroyed livelihoods. This study attempts to go beyond the obvious and immediate impacts of the attacks, to consider the medium- and long-term consequences for people’s survival, and their longer-term future.
This report focuses on the management of disaster risks and vulnerabilities for a range of reasons. Due to the recurrent nature of crisis, Ethiopian livelihood systems have evolved to manage diverse disaster hazards, e.g. the migration patterns of pastoralists are designed to optimally manage the impact of drought on pasture and water resources; farmers seek to mitigate covariate risks through diversifying their cropping patterns; families strategically use family members to combine production with wage labor, etc. A focus on these household risk and vulnerability management strategies leads to more effective disaster preparedness, relief, recovery and prevention, and development, policies and interventions.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
By D. Abebe, D, A. Cullis, A. Catley, Y. Aklilu, G. Mekonnen, and Y. Ghebrechirstos (2008). Disasters, 32/2 June 2008
By A. Catley, T. Leyland, B. Admassu, G. Thomson, M. Otieno, and Y. Aklilu (2005). IDS Bulletin 36/2, 96-102