Climatic variability exerts tremendous influence on the livelihoods and well-being of pastoralists who inhabit the arid and semi-arid lands of the Horn of Africa. Recent advances in climate forecasting technologies have raised the intriguing prospect of reasonably accurate forecasts of coming seasons' rainfall patterns. Several donors and governments in the region are keenly interested in these technologies and in developing forecast delivery channels on the assumption that this information will prove valuable to the vulnerable populations it is meant to help not only indirectly, as an input into top-down early warning systems, but also directly, as a basis for improving choice under uncertainty. We explore the value of such external climate forecast information to pastoralists in a large study area spanning southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya using original data collected using both open-ended qualitative methods to identify and understand indigenous climate forecasting methods and quantitative data collected using survey instruments fielded in two rounds, one before and one after the long rains of 2001. The data show that pastoralists rely heavily on indigenous forecasting methods-in terms of having both access to and confidence in these methods-while external forecasts are less commonly received or believed. We elicited pastoralists' subjective, probabilistic expectations of the coming season's rainfall and find that neither use of nor belief in external forecasts causes any appreciable change in respondents' seasonal rainfall expectations. Moreover, relatively few pastoralists act on their own climate expectations, no matter how formed. In sum, climate forecast information does not seem a limiting factor at present in pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa, not least of which because of the existence of a vibrant and still-relevant tradition of indigenous forecasting.

This paper presents comparative qualitative and quantitative evidence from rural Kenya and Madagascar in an attempt to untangle the causality behind persistent poverty. We find striking differences in welfare dynamics depending on whether one uses total income, including stochastic terms and inevitable measurement error, or the predictable, structural component of income based on a household's asset holdings. Our results suggest the existence of multiple dynamic asset and structural income equilibria, consistent with the poverty traps hypothesis. Furthermore, we find supporting evidence of locally increasing returns to assets and of risk management behaviour consistent with poor households' defence of a critical asset threshold through asset smoothing.

Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention by a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists, and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there surprisingly is little agreement on what constitutes poverty in rural Africa, how it should be assessed, and what should be done to alleviate it. Based on data from an interdisciplinary study of pastoralism in northern Kenya, this article examines issues of poverty among one of the continent's most vulnerable groups, pastoralists, and challenges the application of such orthodox proxies as incomes/expenditures, geographic remoteness, and market integration. It argues that current poverty debates 'homogenize' the concept of 'pastoralist' by failing to acknowledge the diverse livelihoods and wealth differentiation that fall under the term. The article concludes that what is not needed is another development label (stereotype) that equates pastoralism with poverty, thereby empowering outside interests to transform rather than strengthen pastoral livelihoods.3

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