Upcoming Publications

The team is currently working on the following publications:

1) Dr Samantha Lacey recently spent two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania, learning about how people are starting to find ways to come together to tackle the environmental challenges they face.

In the UK, we often tend to associate climate change with low energy light bulbs and maybe a bit of unseasonal weather. In rural Africa, the impacts are much more critical. When your food comes from your back garden, and saving enough money for seeds involves scraping together whatever small savings you can over the course of the year, it really matters what the weather does. Deciding when to plant your seeds can mean gambling the lives of your family. Ideally you want to plant them before the rains come so they have the best chance of survival, but recently the rains haven’t come when they used to, or they come and then only last a few days. That’s the worst because the seeds germinate and start to grow but then dry out and die because there is no water for irrigation.

Whilst in East Africa, Samantha met numerous groups who have come together to protect a local spring or reservoir and have set up village committees to make sure everyone gets fair access to the little water that’s available. In some cases, these groups have been so successful that the local farmers have started to produce excess crops and are now looking for ways to get them to market. Several of the Water Users Groups have even come together to form marketing co-operatives and to organise other projects, for example setting up a tree nursery to help replant trees that have been chopped down for firewood.

Samantha said: “It’s amazing to see the determination and innovation of some of these communities when faced with such overwhelming challenges to simply find enough water to drink and to keep their crops alive.”

Samantha’s research will be published by Summer 2010 and will be available here on the Co-operatives for Development website. If you would like to receive a copy or be kept updated about the activities of the CFD team, please email us on cfd@co-op.ac.uk or click here to join our mailing list.

2) Barbara Rawlings and Dr Linda Shaw are researching a series of best practice case studies on gender issues for co-operatives in Africa.