Learning About Livelihoods Insights from Southern Africa

The Disaster Mitigation for Sustainable Livelihoods project (DiMP) was developed by the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, along with partner organizations in southern Africa. This comprehensive guide to applying the livelihoods approach to the practice of disaster risk reduction - a direct outcome of the project - comprises a facilitators handbook and filmed case studies from five southern African countries. The pack contains ten training sessions, which build understanding of the factors that make poor families vulnerable, as well as their inherent strengths. It then explores opportunities for applying these insights in practice. The handbook includes extensive and up-to-date references to further print and Internet information resources. The five film documentaries portray a diverse range of pressures facing people in precarious circumstances, with case studies drawn from Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. These explore the impacts of such diverse disaster events as retrenchment, flood risk, recurrent drought, HIV and AIDS, violence and political instability on individual households and their communities.