Sustainable Livelidhoods

Greetings!  I hope you’re enjoying the weather wherever you are. It seems to be the opening topic in my conversations with family, friends, and colleagues lately! 

The weather of my February reflections is going to be metaphorical. It’s about the importance of creating a climate or environment where sustainable livelihoods can thrive, not just in theory, but in practice. 

Sustainable livelihoods are built on five primary types of capital: human (skills, health), social (networks, relationships), natural (land, water), physical (infrastructure, tools), and financial (savings, income). 

In areas of poverty, it’s a complex challenge to identify and develop dignified, living-wage incomes through maximizing the above resources. Populations that have been excluded from access to education, social, economic, and political resources for generations have very different survival mechanisms than people who were raised in climates of abundant opportunities. 

One way to illustrate this difference is the story of an artisan buyer who approaches woman in a market and asks how much she wants for all of it. She replies that she can’t sell all her products, because then there would be nothing to sell. To the potential buyer’s surprise, the logic of having an abundance of cash to invest in new products didn’t budge her initial decision to not sell all her products to one buyer. 

I’ve heard and experienced many variations on this same theme through the years. When abundance is the norm, maximizing resources through capital investment is the logical assumption. When scarcity is the norm, protecting a long-term source of income (no matter how small) feels safer than eliminating the source of income. 

Natik’s partners understand these types of cultural differences when they are working with groups to determine potential sources of locally sustainable income. 

Another key element of sustainable livelihoods is to assure mechanisms that can ride out and recover from economic, environmental, and/or social shocks, such as natural disasters or market failures. This is one of the reasons why it makes sense to prioritize consideration of local ancestral sources of generating an income. Those types of livelihoods are passed along from one generation to the next with the lessons of resilience baked into the process.

That's why Mujeres Sembrando la Vida, ANADESA, Puerta Abierta, and Ruk’ux have all identified the production of artisan goods as being a reliable (and familiar) source of income. 

The Natik Sustainable Livelihood program is helping ANADESA grow their tourism project, which includes tours of the local area, traditional cooking classes, and beading classes. Pueblo a Pueblo is building on their decade of training local beekeepers so that they can improve their promotion and sale of honey and related products to increase the local demand for honey, that benefits both PaP and the beekeepers. 

Environmental Sustainability ensures that the current livelihood does not deplete natural resources, maintaining the environment for future generations. Often areas of extreme poverty everywhere in the world are located in areas of abundant natural resources. This contributes to an unfortunate situation where international extractive industries like mining, tree extraction, and single crops such as rubber and palm oil can offer low wages while depleting the land of its valuable resources. 

The intergenerational equity component of sustainability maintains the importance of livelihoods setting up lasting infrastructures that will provide opportunities for future generations, not just current ones.

Sustainable livelihoods empower individuals and communities to move beyond mere survival, fostering stability, economic growth, and the preservation of natural resources. It is a holistic concept used in development to understand, analyze, and improve the living conditions of poor households in a lasting way.  

Thanks for being part of that story.