RurbanLivestockSystems - Building rurban livelihoods through livestock

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr. Kaderi De Bukari; Professor Dr. Nikolaus Schareika; Professorin Dr. Eva Schlecht
• Subject Area: Animal Breeding, Animal Nutrition, Animal Husbandry ; African, American and Oceania Studies ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548312187

The keeping of ruminant livestock, particularly cattle, sheep, and goats, is a quintessential component of rurban spaces and communities in the Global South, especially in West Africa. Through close collaboration between the disciplines of Animal Husbandry in the Tropics and Subtropics and Social and Cultural Anthropology, project B03 aims at identifying and analysing the processes through which livestock keeping contributes to the formation, support, and sustainability of rurban livelihoods and lifestyles in wider Accra, Ghana. Taking the four analytical perspectives of FOR5903, Endowments & Place, Institutions & Practices, Flows & Connectivity, and Livelihoods & Lifestyles as starting points, the project analyses the complementary processes through which a heterogeneous and fragmented rurbanity in West Africa provides a field of opportunity and experimentation for new forms of connectivity, particularly business generation, in the livestock sector. It looks at how new natural resources, social networks, labour (including skills) and capital open up an arena of negotiation for the reshaping of West Africa’s livestock sector, where constant creativity and adaptation, as well as re- and self-organisation, are the order of the day. To this end, the project proposes to comprehensively examine livestock keeping as a social-ecological system that provides an inroad to rurbanity in spatial and social terms, and evaluate its sustainability.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5903: Sustainable Rurbanity - Resources, Society, and Regulatory Systems
• International Connection: Ghana
• Cooperation Partner: Sabina Appiah-Boateng, Ph.D.