HERDING 4 HEALTH THROUGH HERDING 4 HOPE

The Herding 4 Health (H4H) Model was designed to empower livestock-owning communities and stakeholders to overcome the suite of challenges they face in a landscape in a practical, traditionally acceptable way that offers impact and sustainability in the face of climate change, wildlife-livestock conflict, skills and job shortages, poverty, and transboundary animal diseases. We recognised, through research and experience, that at the core of most of the challenges and barriers faced by livestock- owning communities in Africa are livestock not adequately attended to by communities with a lack of basic skills and means for effective and strategic herding and kraaling. The H4H Model empowers communities by equipping herders in communities with the necessary skills and processes to ensure herding and kraaling can enable compliance with good management practices that are wildlife-friendly, climate-smart, and sustainable. Compliance records kept by skilled herders and the governance structures developed to enable collective action by farmers in a landscape can then assist to overcome trade barriers and lack of investment needed to ensure communities are more resilient and livelihood strategies are sustainable.

The H4H Model revolves around the 4-H action cycle that pulls communities out of a poverty trap towards hope and a better future: – Hope, Herd, Heal, and Harvest. Communities with the hope and belief that they themselves, their livestock, and their land is able to prosper if they are willing and able to manage their livestock well will move out of conviction and not incentive alone. Through skilled herders within communities, livestock are herded and kraaled strategically to heal the land, the herds, and relationships towards greater unity amongst stakeholders. Farmers working in unity allows for improved compliance with best practices and the healthy and productive herds on restored rangelands offer a harvest in the form of diversified livelihood, enterprise, and investment opportunities that further sustains best practice and instills more hope for more action. Such a positive impact in rangelands, animals, livelihoods, and community governance results in inspiration, social, ecological and financial returns over generations.

The Herding 4 Hope Team is positioned with all the experience, resources, and skills needed to support equip and empower any community and its partners to diligently and systematically walk along the journey facilitated through the H4H Model to realize a future hoped for.

HERDING 4 HOPE

“HOPE has a NAME.”