Pastoralist Areas Resilience Improvement through Market Expansion (PRIME) Project

The project aims to enhance prospects for long-term development in the country's dryland landscape, where the pastoralist livelihood system prevails. PRIME is designed to be transformative, innovative, and achieve scale through market-driven approaches to livestock production and livelihood diversification that support dryland communities to adapt to a changing climate. The project focuses on five major objectives: improving productivity and competitiveness of livestock and livestock products, enhancing pastoralists' adaptation to climate change, strengthening alternative livelihoods for households transitioning out of pastoralism, ensuring enhanced innovation, learning, and knowledge management, and improving nutritional status of targeted households through targeted, sustained, and evidence-based interventions. To achieve these objectives, PRIME works to improve productivity in key livestock market systems, enhance market linkages, improve the enabling environment, and provide effective emergency responses to protect pastoralist assets. During Quarter 11 (April to June 2015), PRIME implemented various activities to achieve its objectives. In the area of improved productivity and competitiveness of livestock and livestock products, the project conducted 4 trainings, 5 linkage events, one technical assistance intervention, 3 capacity building exposure visits, and 5 new business expansion grants in all target clusters. These activities focused on promoting fodder production, preservation, and utilization, assessing governmental animal health service provision capacity in pastoral areas, and providing business skills training for livestock traders. PRIME also worked with regional local public offices to improve their capacity to provide extension services to pastoral and agro-pastoral communities. In addition, the project facilitated the organization of two livestock trade and dairy business-to-business (B2B) events, which resulted in the establishment of formal agreements between four milk producer cooperatives and seven private milk collectors and AddisKidan, a company that collects milk from pastoralists. As a result, the company was able to double its capacity of collecting milk from 230 liters per day to 450 liters per day. In the area of enhanced pastoralists' adaptation to climate change, PRIME continued facilitating community Social Analysis and Action (SAA) group conversations on behavioral and social issues, including herd management, livestock fattening, fodder production, and hay making. Some SAA groups in Liben, Amibara, and Yabello began taking practical actions, such as investing in animal fattening, fodder production, pasture preservation, and hay making, and regularly saving money at the household level. In Derara, Fegero, and Surur kebeles in Babile Oromiya, SAA groups led by women in collaboration with local administrations agreed to address harmful traditional practices, including early marriage, male extravagancies, and the culture of asking for excessive dowry. PRIME also used the participatory scenario development approach for promoting resilience in local disaster risk management (DRM) planning and livelihoods investment decision making. This approach focuses on the use of participatory scenario planning (PSP) as a process that enables communities and local governments to explore potential future changes, their associated impacts, and develop a locally relevant action plan for implementation by the communities themselves. The process allows them to effectively manage both the opportunities and risks of change, thereby increasing their resilience.