In recent years, social protection issues have gained unprecedented momentum in Africa. This is reflected in the fact that most African countries have either introduced or are considering social protection measures, as witnessed by initiatives within the African Union (AU), African national governments and their development partners in the international donor community. The 2004 'Ouagadougou Declaration and Plan of Action', the 2006 'Livingstone and Yaounde Calls for Action', the 2008 'African Union Social Policy Framework for Africa' and the 2010 'Social Ministers' Khartoum Declaration on Social Policy Action Towards Social Inclusion' are key milestones towards an Africa-wide consensus on the need for social protection. Many national governments are also in the process of establishing social protection strategies and policies. Unfortunately, most of them give little attention to the role or potential of informal social protection systems. This is despite the fact that the rural population and those who are engaged in the informal economy, which together constitute the bulk of these countries' populations, depend on informal social protection systems. The possibility of building on existing informal social protection systems and creating complementary linkages between the formal and informal systems is rarely considered by policy-makers and donor agencies in Africa. Instead, most attention is given to formal safety net programmes. Addressing several themes in the social protection literature, this book makes an original and important contribution to the rapidly growing body of literature on social protection in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the themes are relatively neglected or under-researched, while some others are not usually conceptualised as social protection. These themes are organised around the major issues: informal social protection, urban social protection, social protection and physical security, social protection in unstable contexts, climate change, pastoralism, and gender. In fact, the most significant challenge this book offers to current thinking and practice is in focusing attention on local or - indigenous' mutual support systems and institutions, sometimes characterised as 'informal' and 'semi-formal' social protection mechanisms, which are undervalued or even neglected in discourses of 'formal' social protection policy-making and programming. From the discussions presented by the different chapters, the book draws the conclusion that although the trend towards institutionalising social protection as a core government responsibility is welcome and should be encouraged, these formal social protection mechanisms could arguably be strengthened if they acknowledge and build on local experiences and cultural norms around reciprocity and mutual support.

The term climate change is used to denote any significant but extended change in the measures of climate. The changes could be due to natural variability or as a result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy, deforestation, industrial processes, and some agricultural practices. Such activities release large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that hang like a blanket around the earth, thus trapping energy in the atmosphere and causing it to warm up. This results increasingly in climate variability, which is characterised by extreme seasonal, annual, temporal and non-spatial variability in temperature, vagaries of precipitation (rainfall patterns and amounts) and/or wind patterns occurring over a prolonged period of time. The last decade (2001 - 2010) has been the warmest on record; with the average temperatures reaching 0.46 C, above the 1961 - 1990 mean, and 0.21 C warmer than the 1991 - 2000 period. It has been proved that the African continent is warming up faster, all year-round, than the global average; a trend that is likely to continue. By the year 2100, it is predicted that temperature changes will fall into ranges of about 1.4 C to nearly 5.8 C increase in mean surface temperature compared to 1990, and the mean sea level will rise between 10cm to 90 cm (AMCEN 2011). The interior of semiarid margins of the Sahara and central southern Africa will be the most affected by such warming (AMCEN 2011). To tackle the phenomenon of climate change effectively, human societies have put in place a combination of mitigation and adaptation mechanisms and strategies. Whereas mitigation aims at avoiding or lessening the impacts of the unmanageable, the goal of adaptation is to manage the unavoidable. That men and women are affected differently by climate change suggests that they also differ in terms of the adaptation mechanisms they employ. Despite the existence of gender-based differences in the effects of climate change and in adaptation and coping strategies, studies on the gender differential impacts of climate change and variability on women in general and pastoralist women in particular in sub-Saharan Africa are limited. This volume offers insights and knowledge that pastoralist women developed on climate change adaptation through their experiences in their households and communities and thereby tries to narrow this gap.