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This document discusses the challenges facing rural development and the environment in Somaliland. It identifies charcoal production as the main environmental challenge, causing widespread deforestation. About 2/3 of Somaliland's population live rurally in poor conditions with low standards of living. Key priorities to address these issues include promoting alternative energy sources to reduce deforestation, sustainable management of natural resources, improving education and health infrastructure for rural communities, and implementing strategies for disaster preparedness.

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34 views6 pages

Page 1 of 6

This document discusses the challenges facing rural development and the environment in Somaliland. It identifies charcoal production as the main environmental challenge, causing widespread deforestation. About 2/3 of Somaliland's population live rurally in poor conditions with low standards of living. Key priorities to address these issues include promoting alternative energy sources to reduce deforestation, sustainable management of natural resources, improving education and health infrastructure for rural communities, and implementing strategies for disaster preparedness.

Uploaded by

cankawaab
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Introduction

The purpose of this presentation is to define the role rural areas and country towns play
in the persistence of, or often times regrettably, the dissolution of local character and
place. The observations contained in this presentation apply to most types of rural
areas in many different locales. The central argument of this work is that wherever
viable rural settlements exist, the government, professional planners, and inhabitants
within must focus their energies on the immediate place - they must make the word
"local" mean something if we are ever to be successful in the retention and sustenance
of "local community." A rural development doctrine must, if it is to be effective, give
deeper and more concentrated thought to the role of local rural place as we seek to
find solutions to the ongoing problems of population imbalance and the dissolution of
the countryside.
Because these two assumptions are decidedly "counter cultural," they will appear to
many as impractical [Theobold, 1997]. "All of us know," for example, that people prefer
to live in cities because there are more opportunities, services, and great personal
fulfillment. "Everyone knows" that successful business and economic development must
stay focused on metropolitan locations to maximize transportation and labor costs.
"Everyone knows" that many of our small towns and villages are in distress and that
even though the unsettling of the countryside may be a national tragedy, it amounts to
no more than a natural process that will continue to occur over the next century.
Definition of Rural development
Rural development can be defined as, helping rural people set the priorities in their own
communities through effective and democratic bodies, by providing the local capacity;
investment in basic infrastructure and social services, justice, equity and security,
dealing with the injustices of the past and ensuring safety and security of the rural
population, especially that of women.
According to Robert chambers, rural development is a strategy to enable a specific
group of people, poor rural women and men, to gain for themselves, and their children
more of what they want and need. It involves helping the poorest among those who
seek a livelihood in the rural areas to demand and control more of the benefits of rural
development. The group includes small scale farmers, tenants and the landless.

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Challenges and Opportunities


The Ministry of Environment and Rural Development is the public body
responsible for environmental protection, natural resource conservation, and
sustainable rural development.
These are challenging aims to achieve.
Environment: Charcoal production stands out as one of the main, if not main
environmental challenge facing Somaliland today. It is a major cause of
deforestation and environmental degradation across the country. Charcoal production
is both supply and demand driven. On one hand, it is an important provider of
employment and income in rural areas, and does not need much of an initial
investment. On the other hand, demand is very high, and prices are rising all
the time. Almost every family in urban and even rural settlements relies on charcoal as
a source of energy for cooking. A common spectacle as you travel from Hargeisa to
Berbera is the piles of sacks of charcoal that line up the road. An average
household consumes about 3 sacks a month. Each sack weighs 15-20 Kg. In
Hargeisa, there are about 150-200,000 households consuming about 9,188 tons of
charcoal a month or around 110,000 tons a year. Assuming an average tree produces
150Kg(7-10 bags) of charcoal, 735,000 trees are cut every year to satisfy current
demand for charcoal in Hargeisa. Charcoal trade is a big business. A sack or a
bag of charcoal costs Slsh. 44,000 or about US$8, which means sales of
US$50,400,000 in Hargeisa alone. Other environmental challenges, Somaliland must
address include:

luding forests, rangelands, and fisheries

the extinction of indigenous plants and animals

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settlements and villages

ater contamination

Rural Development: About 2/3 of Somalilands population live in rural setting villagers,
pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. The majority or over 1/2 consists of pastoralist
nomads. This is the least developed group of the population in terms of standard of
living, quality of housing, educational attainment, life expectancy at birth, access to
health services, clean water, sanitation facilities and electricity. The development
aspiration of Somaliland as a nation will remain just an unfulfilled dream unless a way is
found for raising the standard of living of the rural community. The challenges in the
way of rural development are many and include:

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Shrinking communal pasture land

maternal mortality

Priorities and Strategies


Given these severe challenges facing the natural environment of Somaliland and
the rural population, decisive measures are urgently required to be taken.
Towards that end, the following key areas will receive priority attention in this NDP
period:
alternative sources of fuel and
energy, such as gas, coal, solar and wind

ontrol resource utilization


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-based State of the Environment report to assess the


status of natural resources and to guide future resource management and development
decisions

sustainable use of
natural resources
isaster preparedness and management

ment of appropriate education and health service infra-structures

m on environment and
rural development

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Conclusions
Throughout this paper I have suggested that change is the price of the rejuvenation of
the countryside and the survival of small towns. In most cases, adequate levels of
employment and income cannot be expected from traditional sectors - especially if rural
areas are expected to decouple from metros. The real choice, as Galston suggests, will
be between decline and forms of innovation that will leave neither individual lives nor
the structure of social relations unchanged. Some, perhaps many, rural residents will
both resent and regret these changes, but they cannot be avoided. Every way of life
requires some economic basis, but a commitment to preserving atotal way of life in the
face of profound economic and social change cannot hope to succeed. Individuals who
are devoted to continuity of place, who want a sustainable base for the generations
who follow, must therefore accept some degree of discontinuities of economic and
social life.
"To be successful, efforts to rejuvenate the rural countryside must rest on genuine local
preferences. Underlying these preferences is some understanding of what rural
individuals, considered simply as citizens of a country, are thought to deserve. Since the
1940s many countries have made the political determination that all citizens, regardless
of place, were entitled to electricity, decent roads, schools, and adequate
water/wastewater facilities. The question in the next century is whether access to
information management through digitalization and fiber optics will be similarly defined
as elements of social citizenship. The question is on the table, and the viability of most
of our rural areas hangs in the balance." [Galston, p. 266]

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