Assessment of coping strategies to drought among agropastoral communities in Nakaseke district, Uganda.

Abstract

Drought has been considered the main reason for food and water scarcity and eventual resilience declines among agropastoral communities in Uganda’s cattle corridor. However, there is little knowledge about suiting coping strategies applied by agropastoral households to ably cope with drought. To address this gap, this study was guided by three research objectives were to: (1) determine the different coping strategies for the agropastoral communities to drought. (2) Determine the conditions influencing adoption of the coping strategies among agropastoral communities to drought. (3) Evaluate the effectiveness of agropastoral communities’ coping strategies to drought. A cross-sectional study approach involving the use of household survey data among 78 households was utilized. Results revealed that agropastoral households significantly relied on changing of planting dates and small-scale irrigation. The most dominant conditions for adoption of coping strategies were sex of the household, marital status and level of education though not significant. The overall effectiveness of the coping strategies adopted in mitigating drought showed that conservation farming practices and manure use were more effective to enhance household growing of drought resistant crops varieties. Therefore this study recommends that stakeholders and policy makers should focus at encouraging the agropastoral households to use more drought resistant varieties to enhance household resilience to cyclic droughts.