Building sustainable livelihoods in rural communities still remains a challenge. It has been more abused in practice. Communities are considered as mere “recipients”. Their participation has been confined to choose an item from a pre-determined list of livelihood options. Communities receive trainings one after the other and sometimes financial support for start-ups. When a project is over livelihood initiatives are over until another project repeats the same process. Might it be that donor interests take precedence over community interests ? This may sound cynical, but isn’t it what we see happening ?
Communities themselves have well-established livelihood enhancement and diversification patterns. The problem is we do not seek to understand, acknowledge or help communities turn them into decent work. Instead, the concept of livelihood development is presented as a brand-new idea to rural communities.
Various drivers shape how rural communities make livelihood-choices. Social values may be more important in one community. In another, power structures do their bit. Turning blind eye to influencing factors within communities, will jeopardize the sustainability of livelihoods.
Being one sub-sector oriented is another way that things can go wrong. As an example, after about 6-month lobster fishing, fishers turn to migrant fishing to tackle seasonality which they spend being members of a beach seine fishery. Should we limit our interventions to lobster fishing sub-sector or should we analyze the whole value chain of fisheries for interventions ? Couldn’t service gaps in fisheries value chains be turned into livelihoods options ? Lack of ice, water, fuel supplies or lack of peeling workers, fish graders, net menders can be possible livelihood opportunities.
Women’s role in rural livelihoods spreads far and wide. In agriculture, women may work as processors or in fisheries they may work as sellers. Should we single out them and introduce new livelihoods ? or should we look at value chains of agriculture and fisheries as a whole and help them do it better ? Should we not facilitate service providers or changes in policies so women’s roles as processors or sellers are effectively established ?
Institutions in rural economies act as representatives between public and private stakeholders. Development workers would easily identify relatively formal, visible institutions within communities. But invisible social or socio-cultural institutions, such as caste or values may exist throughout society and inside formal visible institutions. These nested institutions can enormously influence how communities make livelihood-choices. Failure to understand the roles of such institutions could keep livelihoods programs at stake or even lead to crisis in a community. Isn’t it time, we ditched one-size-fits-for-all approaches to building livelihoods and adopted approaches that accommodate different characteristics of communities ?
Our task involves being sensitive to community characteristics and rural economic complexities to seek what is right in their context and to do it right.
