LADDER is a research project funded by the Policy Research Programme of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) that seeks to identify alternative routes by which the rural poor can climb out of poverty. LADDER is working with nearly 40 villages and 1,200 households in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Kenya to discover the blocking and enabling agencies in the institutional environme...

This study explores the nexus between livelihood goals (LGs) and strategy (LS) selection preferences. We construct a measurement of three (survival, security, self-respect goals) by combining qualitative quantitative analysis classify strategies into groups (agricultural, non-agricultural, diversification) based on household income sources. The multinomial logit model with fixed effects empiric...

The welfare of many poor and low-income rural households is vulnerable to earthquakes secondary geological disasters. academic literature, however, pays little attention the livelihood pressure, adaptability, strategies these households. Based on survey data 327 in Wenchuan Lushan earthquake-stricken areas Sichuan Province, strategy characteristics were analyzed, disordered multi-classification...

Majority of the Nigerian population lives in rural area, where agriculture is the mainstay. Nigerian rural areas are the most neglected and its people, the most deprived with regard to the provision of modern health care services. Besides, they lack other basic infrastructural necessary for the maintenance and promotion of good health. The implication is that rural dwellers are subjected to hig...

Household diversification into nonfarm work activities is a major rural livelihood strategy in many developing economies. In this paper, we explore empirically if rural households in Uganda leverage their nonfarm earnings to overcome credit constraints and invest in high yielding maize seed varieties. We use a semiparametric estimator of binary outcomes that accommodates endogenous regressors s...

The potential importance of natural resources for the livelihood of poor rural households has long been recognized but seldom quantified and analyzed. In this paper we apply poverty and inequality measures to national and community level data sets to explore the impacts of resource extraction on rural welfare. Our findings suggest that natural resource extraction reduces both income inequality ...

Rural populations are undergoing rapid changes in both their livelihoods and land uses, with associated impacts on ecosystems, global biogeochemistry, and climate change. A primary challenge is, thus, to explain these shifts in terms of the actors and processes operating within a variety of land systems in order to understand how land users might respond locally to future changes in broader-sca...