Building gender sensitive resilience through women's economic empowerment

Lessons learned from pastoralist women in Ethiopia

This paper explores how the overlap of a double marginalized identity produces particular disadvantages for pastoralist women in Ethiopia, and how an Oxfam intervention in the Somali region is addressing the connection between these disadvantages and poverty and power.

In addition to ethnicity, age, or disability, gender in the Somali region of Ethiopia strongly intersects with pastoralism, a predominant livelihood in East Africa and the Horn. Pastoralist communities live in an arid and semi-arid environment characterized by major external risks such as recurrent droughts and recently, flooding, which differently affect pastoralist men and women.