ABSTRACT
This chapter describes about the potential of irrigated agriculture to be a valuable alternative or additional livelihood to pastoralism. The size of the pastoral population in the Horn of Africa is estimated at between about 12 million and 22 million people, depending on source and on definition. The decline in the welfare of pastoralists will not be halted or reversed by focusing only, or even principally, on livestock-based pastoral livelihoods. Diversification in pastoral areas is already happening fast and affects different social groups in different ways. The generally accepted impression of failure associated with past attempts to involve pastoralists in irrigation relates to an assumption that they provided very poor economic returns to the investment, although, in practice, this return has not often been rigorously calculated. An irrigation scheme in a pastoral area centred on food production can sell much of its output to surrounding pastoralists, thus retaining within the pastoral areas earnings which would otherwise have gone elsewhere.
