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...

The livelihoods of Chinese rural households are undergoing a transformation amid urbanization. While participation in the urban economy has improved rural living standards, rural income has consistently lagged behind urban income, and a broader prosperity gap persists between urban and rural areas. How to increase rural income and reduce the rural-urban gap remains a major challenge for the Chi...

Livelihood diversification is essential to food security and improved incomes for human development in African rural communities. Uganda’s agrarian economy suffers from limited diversification, environmental degradation, low incomes, and multifaceted negative impacts of AIDS. Efforts to stimulate and support innovation in agricultural production technology, forms of social organization, and poo...

Rural-urban migration remains a livelihood strategy employed by the rural populace in the densely populated southeastern region of Nigeria. This study appraises the impact of rural-urban migration on rural livelihoods in southeastern region of Nigeria. Questionnaire surveys on 225 heads of rural households and focus group discussions in each of the five states in the study area were used to eli...

There is a knowledge gap and practical demand to understand the co-evolutionary relationship between rural household livelihood and regional ecological footprints for developing sustainable livelihoods in ecological conservation regions. This paper tracks the change trajectories of rural household livelihoods and regional ecological footprints in four water source areas of the South-to-North Wa...

This study looks at rural livelihoods in semi-arid and arid rural areas in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The decade-long socio-economic recession coupled with recurrent droughts presented a myriad of challenges to rural households in Zimbabwe. Taking Mudzi, a rural district in Zimbabwe, as a case study, the study explores the livelihood conditions and how households have managed to organize and cluster t...

Contemporary debates on the rural sector in Latin America have led many to question the future viability of peasant livelihoods in the Andes. The paper first discusses certain limitations in these discussions of peasant viability. Firstly, they conflate agrarian with rural livelihoods, thus deflecting attention from the myriad transitions that have occurred in the ways through which people make...

extended abstract 1. introduction the area under study has several problems such as deficits in household spending, the high ratio of illiteracy and unemployment, the high number of children, the mistrust between villagers and so that these problems have created some obstacles on the way of rural development in the district. identify and analyze the issues and introduce proper solutions to elim...