“ Behavior Change, Diversified Sources of Income keys to livelihood improvement
“Behavior change a key on livelihood improvement
in Rwanda, A case study Gatunda sector”
By Emmanuel MUGEMA, Livelihood proponent at Food for the
Hungry Rwanda, Nyagatare District|Gatunda sector.
Most of our rural population in
Rwanda derive their daily survival from agriculture and agriculture related
small businesses, however, food insecurity and unreliable livelihoods remain the
major challenges that most of our rural communities are battling with, Thanks
to Food for the Hungry Rwanda for immense work
that you are putting in to building capacity for both your local staff
and the people you are serving “ one of FH Field staff thanksgiving after a
four days’ training on Entrepreneurship and business skills” Now I have come to
realize why my small business failed few days after starting it, but most of
all how behavior change is a key bedrock to a resilient livelihood building and
improvement, “where every stride/effort to change your status quo for the
better starts from within to outside”.
For the last two years, working
as a livelihood officer at Food for the Hungry Rwanda and having been
implementing livelihood projects and initiatives by facilitating capacity
building processes for social protection and livelihood improvement (through
both trainings, providing materials/support and donations), we have registered
the successes of behavior change on improving lives of our beneficiaries whereby
after training them on business and entrepreneurship, many smallholder farmers
have managed to start off-farm small
businesses giving them hope for a better future for their children while a few
ones still lag behind in their comfort zones unable to change their status quo
as a result of failing to adopt new ideas and practices but rather stick to the
traditional way of doing things,
Another impact on how behavior
change improves lives is observed after a farmer field school training on good
agriculture practices/GAP, whereby the early adopters/farmers significantly
benefit from applying practices of what they learned compared to the late
adopters or resisting farmers. The same behavior change resistance has held
back some of our few beneficiaries who stay the same way they were at the
beginning of our development program yet they have benefited equally to these
who are doing pretty well and a head of them.
“A call for behavior change”
“Time has changed so must we” in
our never-ending journey towards building a sustainable and resilient and environment-friendly livelihood for our
country and our people not only in Rwanda but also in many east African
agrarian communities especially smallholder farmers, adaptive behavior change
is a great asset in tapping opportunities that come from our exponentially
increasing population, new business opportunities and technologies, from
subsistence farming to market oriented, from a purely chemical fertilizer based
farming to a chemorganic one and eventually to a purely organic fertilizer
based farming/homorganic farming, and then to starting off-farm income
generation activities and starting small businesses hence building diversified sources
of livelihoods.
Emmanuel MUGEMA.
