Transforming Livelihoods
Meanings And Concepts Of Drought, Coping And Risk Management In Botswana

According to meteorological statistics, and in terms of the long-term mean of rainfall, one out of three years in Botswana is a drought year. Particularly devastating are several droughts in succession (e.g., 1981/82–1986/87), or droughts that are accompanied by extremely high temperatures and extend over larger parts of the southern African sub-continent (e.g., the 1991/92 'drought of the century'). But even apart from the mere lack of sufficient precipitation, the high spatial variation of rainfall may cause severe problems for some areas even in years with overall precipitation above average. Drought can thus be seen as the major natural hazard for rural livelihoods in Botswana. From this perspective, environmental risk is a function of the probability of the drought hazard striking and the outcome of the hazard event in terms of loss of lives and/or assets. Surprisingly enough, for the last twenty years this environmental risk has been low in Botswana, despite the extremely high probability of a meteorological drought. On the other hand, a number of shortcomings of these programmes have lately been revealed. There seems to be a growing gap between what is officially intended by the drought-relief measures, and what their actual outcome is in the target areas and their true impact on the target groups. As will be shown in this paper, this has a lot to do with transforming connotations of risk and a general process of modernisation and urbanisation, all contributing to changing vulnerability patterns in rural areas.