For pastoralists, infrastructure must move beyond concrete

A timely weather forecast can help a pastoralist move a herd before drought takes hold. A nearby veterinary service can stop an outbreak before it spreads. A protected livestock route can mean reaching water, pasture and markets safely. Where these services are missing, the consequences can be devastating.

Pastoralism is a food-production and livelihood system centred on raising livestock on natural grazing lands. Many pastoralists move seasonally with their animals, following changes in water and pasture. This mobility is a deliberate way of managing uncertainty, particularly in drylands and other environments where crop production is difficult or is not a viable option.

Around 200 million pastoralists raise livestock worldwide, and rangelands cover approximately 54 per cent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface. Yet pastoral communities often have limited access to veterinary care, markets, financial services, telecommunications and reliable water infrastructure. Their livelihoods are also under pressure from blocked livestock routes, shrinking grazing areas and rangeland degradation.

These interconnected challenges reflect the kind of landscape-level problems that CGIAR’s Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program (MFL) is designed to address. Through its areas of work, MFL brings together research on land and water management, sustainable production, climate resilience, governance, markets and social inclusion. Its ambition is to help develop solutions that restore and sustainably manage rangelands while improving access to services, strengthening pastoral livelihoods and supporting the institutions and policies needed to take successful approaches to scale.

Protecting the routes that connect pastoral economies

Livestock routes are more than pathways. They connect pastoralists to grazing areas, water sources, markets, veterinary facilities, and other services.

Research led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has helped make these networks visible. In Ethiopia, participatory mapping brought pastoralists, government authorities and other stakeholders together to document livestock routes and the resources that support them. The resulting maps include markets, water points, salt licks, veterinary facilities, and human-health infrastructure. More recently, ILRI has supported national livestock-route mapping in Ethiopia and county-level mapping in Kenya.

This work gives planners evidence to protect livestock corridors from encroachment, identify gaps in essential services and direct investment where it can support mobility and trade. It also contributes to the agroecological principle of connectivity, which calls for stronger links between producers and consumers through fair distribution networks rooted in local economies. By connecting pastoralists more reliably to livestock markets, services and buyers, well-planned routes can reduce barriers to trade and help pastoral producers participate more effectively in local and regional food systems. Protecting these routes also supports equitable access to land, water and grazing resources, consistent with the related agroecological principle of land and natural-resource governance. These principles are set out in the High Level Panel of Experts’ framework of 13 agroecological principles.

Taking information to where decisions are made

Physical infrastructure matters, but so does the infrastructure that carries information.

Pastoralists continually make decisions about where to move, when to sell animals, and how to manage increasingly uncertain weather.

Those decisions depend on timely and locally relevant information.

KAZNET, an open-source platform developed through ILRI-led research, enables community members to collect and share data on livestock markets, rangeland conditions and household food security. Its offline functionality is particularly important in areas with weak connectivity. Data can be collected without an internet connection and uploaded later. Information is then made available through accessible dashboards and other communication channels. In Kenya, pastoralists have used KAZNET data to inform livestock sales and purchases, while work in Ethiopia is exploring how the platform can strengthen national and regional resilience and early-warning systems.

In Senegal, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, through AICCRA and its partners, has worked with national institutions to strengthen climate information and advisory services for farmers and pastoralists. The system brings together the national meteorological agency, multidisciplinary working groups, community radio and a pastoral community of practice embedded within the livestock directorate. As a result of the initiative, https://alliancebioversityciat.org/stories/aiccra-science-reach-farmers… million farmers and pastoralists now receive actionable climate information. This institutional foundation matters as much as the technology: a service is only sustainable when local organisations have the capacity and mandate to continue delivering it.

Connecting animal health and financial protection

Veterinary services remain difficult to deliver across large and sparsely populated rangelands. ILRI research has examined how community-based animal-health workers, veterinary paraprofessionals and private providers can extend care into remote areas. It has also emphasized the value of bundling veterinary care with human health, water, education and other services, reducing the cost and difficulty of reaching mobile populations.

Pastoralists also need services that protect their assets when drought overwhelms normal coping strategies. ILRI and its partners developed index-based livestock insurance to protect livestock keepers against severe forage scarcity. Satellite data are used to monitor rangeland conditions and trigger payouts before widespread livestock deaths occur, giving pastoralists resources to purchase feed or meet other urgent needs. The approach has informed both commercial insurance products and government social-protection programmes in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Water infrastructure that works with the landscape

Water infrastructure can strengthen pastoral livelihoods, but poorly located or managed water points can concentrate livestock, degrade surrounding pasture or disrupt customary access arrangements.

Research involving the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) demonstrates the value of approaches designed around local landscapes. In Ethiopia’s Afar region, water-spreading weirs were used to slow seasonal floodwater and distribute it over degraded land. The intervention supported forage and crop production while helping pastoral communities make productive use of water that had previously passed through the landscape as destructive runoff.

ICARDA’s work in drylands adds an equally important policy dimension: pastoral mobility must be recognised as ecological infrastructure. Investments in water, markets and services must therefore preserve seasonal routes and collective access to land, rather than unintentionally fragmenting them.

Building systems around pastoral realities

Access to services and infrastructure can strengthen pastoral livelihoods, but only when investments reflect how pastoral systems function. Water points, livestock routes, markets, veterinary care, finance and information services must work as a connected system, shaped by pastoralists’ knowledge and accessible to women, young people and mobile communities.

The International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists offers an opportunity to rethink how investment reaches pastoral areas. Governments, development partners and research institutions must move beyond isolated projects and invest in inclusive, climate-resilient systems that protect mobility, connect pastoralists to essential services and sustain the rangelands on which their livelihoods depend. When services move with pastoral realities, pastoral communities are better equipped not only to withstand risk, but to build secure and productive futures.

Author: Regina Edward-Uwadiale