Wetland management and sustainable livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa
Through collaborative actions, University of Worcester research has built the capacity of sub-Saharan African communities and non-governmental organisations (NGO) to implement a social-ecological Functional Landscape Approach (FLA) to managing wetlands and catchments.
Issue
Understanding the relationship between people, wetlands, and catchments is a critical pre-requisite to implementing strategies that address peoples’ livelihood needs, increase food security, reduce vulnerability to climate change, and sustain ecosystem services.
Approach
Researchers investigated the social-ecological benefits to communities of implementing the FLA in Kankhulukulu catchment, Malawi.
Research in northern Malawi also explored the social-ecological sustainability of Tiyeni’s (an NGO) deep-bed farming (DBF) system of conservation agriculture (CA) and its contribution to the FLA as a catchment innovation.
Impact
Since 2017, community-based action research in Kankhulukulu has helped develop six community-based institutional structures to oversee wetland and catchment issues and led to the development of farmer-led low-tech environmental and livelihood monitoring systems.
Subsequent impacts have included crop diversification, enhanced environmental sustainability, and increased income generation.
More information
Institution: University of Worcester
Researchers: Dr Alex Dixon, Dr Rachael Carrie
Share this resource
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY NC 4.0), which permits use, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is cited and it is for non-commercial purposes. Please contact us for other uses.
How to cite
Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) (2023) Wetland management and sustainable livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa. Available at https://rgs.org/wetlandmanagement Last accessed on: <date>