ABSTRACT
Diversified livelihoods may involve combining farming with wage labour, trading, selling services or producing commodities for sale. Diversified livelihoods may be a response to seasonalities in farm production. Decades of labour migration have rested on households keeping footholds in both the urban labour market and a farming operation. Northern Province is a poor, marginal region in North Eastern Zambia. As in many other parts of Southern Africa, its economic history has been shaped by the rise and demise of labour migrancy. After Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, the Government followed a dual policy towards the agricultural sector. Making a living in rural Africa involves improvising responses to disappearing job prospects, falling agricultural output, collapsing infrastructure and the withdrawal of public services. In the late 1970s, Pottier found that people living in Mambwe territory, lacking access to jobs in the urban economy, had attempted to reactivate the flow of cash into the region.
