Improving rural livelihoods and alleviating poverty in mountain communities pose the most critical development challenge in the HKH. The region’s rural people live in remote and environmentally harsh areas with poor social and physical infrastructures and unfavourable market conditions. Traditional subsistence smallholder farming and migratory pastoral livelihoods in these mountain regions face increasing challenges from the impacts of climate change, human-animal conflicts, increased natural disasters, and the degradation of forests and rangelands. In addition, poor infrastructure, limited access to water and energy, poor market linkages, and limited know-how on the development of marketable products and post-harvest management threaten the sustainability of mountain agriculture and traditional rural livelihoods. Together, these factors contribute to a gradual decline in the productive labour force and an increase in the feminization of labour in the farming sector, eroding traditional knowledge and leading to agricultural land being left fallow.
Managing such transformations requires innovative approaches and strategies for sustainable livelihoods. Given their relatively small and scattered populations, mountain communities often go unheard in political and policy discourse. Despite significant progress, technological advancement, and communications developments in lowland areas, economic growth in the South Asian region has not translated into inclusive livelihood opportunities for the rural poor in the HKH. Poverty, vulnerability, and inequality are widespread, and access to resources and services and gainful employment opportunities are limited. An essential question is how poverty, gender, vulnerability, social inequality, and livelihood insecurity in the mountains can be better understood and addressed.
In the next five years we will focus on the following actions: