Sustainable Livelihoods
People, in the reality of everyday existence, continually make trade offs between their various livelihood assets to ensure a desired or essential quality of life. Livelihood assets refers to a range of interlocking means such as having a home (ownership, rental, secure tenure); income; social relationships; skills and knowledge; access to credit, basic services and institutional structures; environmental quality; spirituality; health; activity time.
Those enjoying increasing quality of life and high quality of life tend to have a greater variety of livelihood assets which are located in a broad asset base. In contrast to those on the minimum quality of life livelihood status and those living in poverty who have limited assets located in a shallow, variable asset base subject to immediacy and resulting in vulnerability.
Ironically people in both high and low quality of life areas experience livelihood asset pressures. This is because life and the environment is both uncertain, inconsistent and subject to risk. People tend to slip in and out of poverty and/or varying levels of quality of life. Factors such as illness, old age, gender inequality, divorce, retrenchment, relocation of workplace, housing and land insecurity, new government policies, global economic trends which impact the local economy,and environmental risks and hazards drive pressures on livelihood assets - forcing people to negotiate or make trade-off's - sometimes to ensure survival other times to protect or ensure a given and preferred quality of life.
The market is a vital stage on which these trade-offs are played. The loss or reduction in value of one asset raises the dependence on other assets -often disproportionately and raises the incidence and frequency of negative environmental and social consequences. Primarily the failure of markets to value social and environmental issues places people, especially the poor at a disadvantage in terms of current and future generational quality of life. However, the markets also offer an enormous potential to act as an engine which facilitates quality of life for all regardless of location, distance from markets, education, gender etcetera.
In recent years community upliftment initiatives have tended to address the complexity of poverty, social existence and the environment through 'sustainable livelihood' models. These models center on the acknowledgement that people conduct their livelihood activities within their asset base framework. However in these instances the asset base is generally regarded to comprise five key assets as opposed to the more holistic and dual economy assets c2cafrica recognizes in the introductory paragraph.This is because c2cafrica offers a commercial and non-profit marketplace to initiatives located in both economies hence survival and quality of life dependent assets are broader.
* Note: Sustainable livelihoods refers to a collection of similar definitions which center on either desired outcomes or approaches to achieving sustainable quality of life. Importantly all definitions are grounded in the appreciation of peoples assets including capacity to uplift themselves, risks and uncertainty, multidimensional characteristic of poverty and everyday existence (of all people), value of locating initiatives in civil society - specific to circumstance, culture and appreciating the dynamic evolving nature of initiative.
