Baseline study, including socio-economic, gender, youth, capacity building, extension aspects conducted in Aral Sea Action Site covering 100 HHs

Abstract

Agricultural producers in the dryland systems of Central Asia deal with environmental and market risks. To handle those risks, they try to optimize the allocation of their natural, physical, financial, social, and human resources among diverse livelihood options. One major challenge they face is that they often make production and consumption decisions with incomplete information about current and possible future states of market and environmental factors. The adoption and adaptation capacities of the resource-poor women and men and their potential will help to improve their livelihoods and trade-offs in exploitation of natural and production resources, the enabling policy environment, access to services, infrastructure and markets. Understanding and characterizing the multi-dimensional livelihoods of rural communities makes it possible to identify what options may be best suited to what livelihood system, and helps to guide research, and out-scaling strategies. This activity will be conducted at research site (farm and community) levels and will help capture the spatial variation in livelihoods within the research and action sites, and comparative analyses will be done across agro-ecosystems in Central Asia. Eventually, the baseline study-based research in Central Asia Flagship Region aims at agricultural interventions at technical, institutional and policy levels to improve livelihoods and address the vulnerability in dryland production systems.